Occupational Safety

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AFL-CIO Health and Safety Director Peg Seminario told a U.S. Senate committee on Thursday that the current system for developing and issuing worker and workplace safety rules is: A broken and dysfunctional system, which is failing to protect workers and costing workers’ lives.

Firefighting operations can inadvertently increase the chance of a combustible dust explosion if they: Use tactics that cause dust clouds to form or reach the explosible range; use tactics that introduce air, creating an explosible atmosphere; apply incorrect or incompatible extinguishing agents; use equipment or tools that can become an ignition source.

About $1,250 billion  -- or 4% of annual worldwide GDP -- is absorbed by the direct and indirect costs of work accidents and occupational diseases, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO).

OSHA has cited SCR Construction Co. Inc. of Richmond, Texas with 17 safety violations and placed the company in its Severe Violator Enforcement Program following the death in January of a worker. The worker was killed when the flammable barrel he was torch cutting exploded at the employer's maintenance yard in Richmond.

Some states in the U.S. are far more dangerous for workers than others – but they are not necessarily the states where the most dangerous industries are based. Writing in Time Magazine, Gary Belsky describes the surprisingly wide variation in workplace injuries rates from state to state – even within the same industries.

Workers at a Mira Loma, California warehouse that ships goods for Walmart launched a two-day strike last week to protest alleged unsafe working conditions and retaliation against workers who complained about those conditions.

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) are in the process of creating a U.S. Technical Advisory Group (TAG) to lead discussions on the creation of a new occupational health and safety (OH&S) standard for global occupational health and safety.

Halliburton Energy Services has agreed to plead guilty and pay the maximum fine for destroying evidence in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, U.S. Justice Department announced yesterday.

The United States Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans, Louisiana this week refused to grant Transocean Deepwater Drilling, Inc., owner of the Deepwater Horizon, a stay of a recent federal district court order that the company promptly turn over documents that the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) has subpoenaed from the company for its investigation into the April 2010 explosion at the Macondo drilling facility in the Gulf of Mexico.

DuPont has adopted a new global corporate standard and developed stronger work requirements for hot work activities such as welding, cutting and grinding following a fatal hot work accident at the company’s Yerkes chemical facility in Buffalo, New York in 2010.