A comprehensive new book, primarily aimed at East and South Asian factory workers, shows how to advance workplace health and safety from an organizing perspective.
Labor officials in California have passively watched Democratic Governor Jerry Brown put California's state workplace health and safety agency-Cal/OSHA on a starvation diet. The agency has less enforcement resources than under Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, but state labor officials appear to have employed a strategy of maintaining access and friendly relations with Brown and his appointees at all costs, relinquishing the fight for workplace safety.
This May Day, we might want to return to the similarities between the acts of violence outside of Dhaka and in Boston, both events resulted in senseless bloodshed of innocent victims. While we might debate how to prevent tragedies like the Boston marathon bombings, it is abundantly clear that enforcement of safety standards and basic regulations would help prevent the sheer scale of terror and violence from being unleashed yet again in Bangladesh.
"Workers expressed concerns about the building and nothing was done," Liana Foxvog, of the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF), told IBTimes UK.
Though the West Chemical and Fertilizer Company hadn’t had a safety inspection since 1985 and had lied to the Environmental Protection Agency about explosives on the property, it will likely and literally get away with murder.
Every year in the United States, 4,500 Americans die a year in workplace accidents. And yet we only spend approximately $550 million on OSHA’s budget to prevent workplace accidents—on OSHA’s total budget.
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