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Inside corporate America’s campaign to ditch workers’ comp

One Texas lawyer is helping companies opt out of workers’ compensation and write their own rules. What does it mean for injured workers?

Michael Grabell Howard Berkes

October 19, 2015

Standing before a giant map in his Dallas office, Bill Minick doesn’t seem like anyone’s idea of a bomb thrower. But backed by some of the biggest names in corporate America, this mild-mannered son of an evangelist is plotting a revolution in how companies take care of injured workers.

“This is more than a conference – it’s a movement”

OSH advocates gather June 2nd thru 4th to focus on worker safety, empowerment and prevention strategies

May 28, 2015

The National Conference on Worker Safety and Health, bringing together workers, safety advocates and health professionals from across the country, will take place this coming Tuesday June 2nd through Thursday June 4th at the Conference Center at the Maritime Institute in Linthicum Heights, Maryland.

A ProPublica Report:

The cost of a cure: Medicare spent $4.5 billion on new Hepatitis C drugs last year

Charles Ornstein

April 6, 2015

Medicare spent $4.5 billion last year on new, pricey medications that cure the liver disease hepatitis C — more than 15 times what it spent the year before on older treatments for the disease, previously undisclosed federal data shows.

Senator asks OSHA about temp worker buried alive in sugar

Michael Grabell

July 16, 2014

The head of the U.S. Senate's workplace safety subcommittee has asked the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to explain its handling of the death a temp worker who suffocated under a pile of sugar at a Pennsylvania plant. The details of OSHA's investigation were reported Sunday by ProPublica and Univision.

From ProPublica

Temporary Work, Lasting Harm

Michael Grabell Olga Pierce Jeff Larson

December 20, 2013

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – This was it, he told his brother Jojo. He would finally be able to pay his mother back for the fender bender, buy some new shoes and, if things went well, maybe even start a life with his fiancee who was living in Atlanta.

The Expendables: How the temps who power corporate giants are getting crushed

Michael Grabell

July 1, 2013

It’s 4:18 a.m. and the strip mall is deserted. But tucked in back, next to a closed-down video store, an employment agency is already filling up. Rosa Ramirez walks in, as she has done nearly every morning for the past six months. She signs in and sits down in one of the 100 or so blue plastic chairs that fill the office.

Taken for a ride: Temp agencies and ‘raiteros’ in immigrant Chicago

Low wage workers pay to work

Michael Grabell

May 3, 2013

Ty Inc. became one of the world's largest manufacturers of stuffed animals thanks to the Beanie Babies craze in the 1990s. But it has stayed on top partly by using an underworld of labor brokers known as raiteros, who pick up workers from Chicago's street corners and shuttle them to Ty's warehouse on behalf of one of the nation's largest temp agencies.

Built for a simpler era, OSHA struggles when tower climbers die

Posted with permission by ProPublica

Liz Day Ryan Knutson

May 25, 2012

When federal lawmakers passed landmark legislation creating the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, they intended to protect workers by imposing clear, uniform rules on their employers. The 1970 law [2] assumed that the relationship between companies and the people they hired for dangerous jobs would be straightforward, employer to employee.