The nail salon industry is expected to grow at almost twice the rate of other U.S. industries in the next decade, and report authors make recommendations for key stakeholders: ensure quality jobs and labor protections for nail salon workers...
How could California, the model state when it comes to tough environmental regulations, have failed to assess lead-contamination dangers at a battery-recycling facility?
Racial discrimination manifests itself in the workplace through unequal treatment. Even when black women have good jobs and benefits, they often are expected to do more than white colleagues, constantly facing assumptions that they are unqualified. The ramifications of work-life imbalance are stressful for women with resources, but for black women and their children, it can be deadly.
For some occupations, putting oneself in harm’s way is an explicit part of the job description.
For some occupations, putting oneself in harm’s way is an explicit part of the job description.
On September 3, 1991, the Imperial Food Products plant in Hamlet, North Carolina burst into flames. Twenty-five people died, trapped behind the locked doors of the red-brick factory. Most of the victims were women; many were women of color, most were single moms. Another sixty people were injured, and the blast left more than fifty children orphaned. Local officials called the fire an accident, but the women and men who worked at Imperial had been made vulnerable by the factory’s owners as well as public policy.
At 8:48 a.m. on the morning of February 18, 2015, an explosion at the ExxonMobil Torrance refinery in Southern California ripped through the facility with such ferocity, the resulting shockwaves registered on the Richter scale. Dust was scattered over the densely populated neighborhood up to a mile away from the blast. Four workers suffered minor injuries.
Job insecurity or job discrimination based on class, gender or race, is bad for your health. It is a perversity of work that the language of ‘risks and rewards’ is used to justify soaring boardroom pay packets and the growing income inequality at work. But the workers most frequently compelled to take genuine risks – to life, to limb, to health – are those who receive the lowest financial rewards.
Nationally, at all workplaces, one employee is killed on the job every other hour. Twelve a day. These are not all accidents. Too many are foreseeable, preventable, avoidable tragedies. With the approach of April 28, Workers Memorial Day 2017, the USW is seeking in America what workers in Canada have to prevent these deaths. That is a law holding supervisors and corporate officials criminally accountable and exacting serious prison sentences when workers die on the job.
In 2014, the last year with full statistics, 899 construction workers nationwide died from workplace injuries. The reason: loss of union strength and decline in OSHA funding. President Trump's anti-union and anti-federal spending polices promise to only make the situation worse.
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