One of Hank Williams’ classic songs is “I’m so lonesome I could cry.” A review of fatalities reported to OSHA shows that many deaths are lonesome experiences.
OSHA is now posting on it web site descriptions of on-the-job fatalities on a weekly basis. Employers must report these incidents to OSHA within eight hours.
What struck me looking over the most recent reports is how many on the job deaths occur not on assembly lines or on the shop floor, with victims surrounded by their coworkers, but when workers are off on their own.
Unsupervised.
Out of communication.
Doing the most ordinary, commonplace tasks. Jobs that certainly don’t qualify as high-risk, in most cases anyway, if you were do conduct a risk assessment beforehand.
Take these incidences, for example:
Worker was driving north in patrol vehicle when an attempt was made to pass another northbound vehicle. The vehicles made contact and the worker's vehicle went off the road and hit a utility pole.
Apparently, no one else was in the car. And remember, most job fatalities occur on the road, in motor vehicle crashes.
Worker was found unresponsive with head injuries next to an overturned stepladder. The worker never regained consciousness.
Many times victims are found after the fact, with the details of the incident never fully clear.
Worker was found in employee locker room and was taken to emergency room. Worker was pronounced dead shortly after of a possible heart attack.
Again, “worker was found”…
Worker suffered a heart attack and died while walking to meet a forklift driver to get supplies.
Here tragedy strikes in the most ordinary of circumstances, a worker walking to get supplies.
Worker was crushed when the equipment he was standing on slid off the trailer it was loaded on. The worker was crushed between the bag house and the remaining equipment on the ground.
Here one worker, standing on equipment, loses stability and his life.
Worker was riding an ATV, and it appears that the vehicle slipped on the steep terrain throwing the worker off and then landing on top of him.
“It appears” this is what happened because no one was present to witness the event.
Worker complained about not feeling well. The worker went home and collapsed about 3 hours later and died before taken to hospital.
Here a sick worker goes home alone and never returns.
Worker was installing copper flashing on a roof and was found unresponsive on the ground between the bases of two ladders.
Again, all there is to go on is “was found unresponsive.” No buddy present, no details.
Worker was delivering medical products and was run over by his own truck.
“Run over by his own truck.” A single vehicle incident.
Worker was walking from the parking lot to the entrance and was run over by a delivery truck.
Again, something as simple and everyday as a walk through a parking lot ends a life.
Worker was shoveling corn into a bucket of a bobcat and was found unresponsive.
“Was found unresponsive.” Who knows what really happened? No one will.
When you send workers out on their own to do a job, what kind of mindfulness training have they received? Because when they’re on their own, whether it’s on a roof, a road, or a telephone pole, it’s their own alertness that they must depend on.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
True grit in filmmaking
Here are the best movies that capture a hard day’s work
On February 2, 2010, nominations will be announced for the 82nd Academy Awards. This year there will be ten Best Picture nominees instead of the customary five.
With movie award season upon us, (movie critics made their selections in December, Golden Globes will be handed out January 17, Screen Actors Guild Awards January 23, Directors Guild Awards January 30, the Film Independent’s Spirit Awards in March), let’s get into the spirit.
What is the best movie you have seen reflecting the realities, attitudes and culture of true grit working people?
I’m not talking about just in 2009. Hollywood makes so few “working class” films (blue collar is boring, the “suits” decided long ago) that we can’t limit picks to any one year. No, the question is: What is the best movie you have ever seen depicting workers up against the kind of risks and dangers we talk about every month in this magazine?
Hollywood’s comfort zone
This rules out scads of flicks about white-collar corporate characters. Hollywood is more comfortable with white-collar bad guys or sad guys, probably because the characters remind them of themselves. There is 2009’s excellent “Up in the Air” with George Clooney as a headcount exterminator, and you can go back through the years with films such as “Michael Clayton” with Clooney again as a conflicted law firm “fixer,” the greed is good gang in “Wall Street,” an unethical journalist in “Shattered Glass,” Jack Lemmon scrambling to salvage his clothing business in “Save the Tiger,” director John Cassavetes’s stark study of a bored, philandering middle-aged exec in “Faces,” and the 1950s study of conformity in “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” with Gregory Peck donning the uniform.
Where are the films with workers who have dirt beneath their fingernails? Who risk life and limb for a paycheck? Who are not necessarily heroic but down-to-earth real?
For your consideration
I nominate the following:
How Green Was My Valley (1941) — Story of a Welsh valley's turn-of-the-century descent from pastoral paradise to decimated coal mining region and the effect on pre-union miners.
The Bicycle Thief (1948) — One man’s struggle to feed his family. After nearly two years of unemployment, he finds a job posting bills that requires a bicycle. But his bike is stolen on the first day of his job. With his small son he combs the streets of bombed-out, postwar Rome searching for it with no luck. His will finally broken, he steals a bicycle but is caught in the act.
Wages of Fear (1953) — In an remote, hot and desolate Central American village, four men risk all to get out by accepting an offer from an American oil company to drive two trucks filled with nitroglycerin over treacherous terrain to a well fire.
On the Waterfront (1954) — Marlon Brando is an ex-prize fighter who struggles against himself and union corruption along New York’s grim, wintry, dangerous docks.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) — An angry young man trapped in a mindless factory job in a polluted, down and dirty northern English industrial town spends Saturday nights drinking and Sunday mornings fishing; a rebel without focus.
Norma Rae (1979) — Based on a true story, an uneducated woman fights to improve her own life and deplorable conditions in a southern textile mill.
The Devil’s Miner (2005) — A documentary of two brothers, age 12 and 14, raised without a father in a shanty on the side of a mountain in Bolivia, who scramble through silver mines daily to afford the clothing and supplies needed for their education, the only ticket to escape their bleak destiny.
Mississippi Chicken (2007) — Real-life documentary of an activist working among trailer park Latin Americans employed in poultry plants and who are too scared to cause trouble or alert authorities to workplace abuses.
Encounters at the End of the World (2007) — Another documentary, this one studies the motives and philosophies of marine biologists, physicists, plumbers, and truck drivers who work in extreme conditions as far away from society as one can get at the Antarctic compound of the National Science Foundation.
The Simpsons — (1989 – present) I’m cheating here, of course. This is TV-land. But the follies of Homer the nuke plant operator, his family and buddies, are really no farce; beneath the buffoonery are populist predicaments of work and play. Plus, unlike most “working-class” film central characters, Homer is no victim, no underdog scraper, or stranger in a strange land.
To this list I’d add the following films, which I’ve read about but not seen. Perhaps you have:
Bread and Roses (2001) — The 1990 Service Employees International Union's Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles is depicted through the struggle of an immigrant woman who refuses to believe she cannot win every battle on her own terms.
El Norte (1983) — A young brother and sister journey from their remote Guatemalan village to the promised land of the Los Angeles. Working as a domestic, the sister is puzzled why her employers uses a washing machine. Her brother works his way up from busboy to waiter to the promise of a better job in Chicago, but their past returns to haunt them.
Hard Labour (1973) — Brutally harsh study of an aging Englishwoman and her daily grind cleaning the homes of the wealthy. She returns to her own home each night to face whines and rants from her husband, an alcoholic custodian.
Blue Collar (1978) — Richard Pryor is one of three friends scraping by trying to escape auto assembly line boredom, hazards, and fears of a dead-end future.
On February 2, 2010, nominations will be announced for the 82nd Academy Awards. This year there will be ten Best Picture nominees instead of the customary five.
With movie award season upon us, (movie critics made their selections in December, Golden Globes will be handed out January 17, Screen Actors Guild Awards January 23, Directors Guild Awards January 30, the Film Independent’s Spirit Awards in March), let’s get into the spirit.
What is the best movie you have seen reflecting the realities, attitudes and culture of true grit working people?
I’m not talking about just in 2009. Hollywood makes so few “working class” films (blue collar is boring, the “suits” decided long ago) that we can’t limit picks to any one year. No, the question is: What is the best movie you have ever seen depicting workers up against the kind of risks and dangers we talk about every month in this magazine?
Hollywood’s comfort zone
This rules out scads of flicks about white-collar corporate characters. Hollywood is more comfortable with white-collar bad guys or sad guys, probably because the characters remind them of themselves. There is 2009’s excellent “Up in the Air” with George Clooney as a headcount exterminator, and you can go back through the years with films such as “Michael Clayton” with Clooney again as a conflicted law firm “fixer,” the greed is good gang in “Wall Street,” an unethical journalist in “Shattered Glass,” Jack Lemmon scrambling to salvage his clothing business in “Save the Tiger,” director John Cassavetes’s stark study of a bored, philandering middle-aged exec in “Faces,” and the 1950s study of conformity in “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” with Gregory Peck donning the uniform.
Where are the films with workers who have dirt beneath their fingernails? Who risk life and limb for a paycheck? Who are not necessarily heroic but down-to-earth real?
For your consideration
I nominate the following:
How Green Was My Valley (1941) — Story of a Welsh valley's turn-of-the-century descent from pastoral paradise to decimated coal mining region and the effect on pre-union miners.
The Bicycle Thief (1948) — One man’s struggle to feed his family. After nearly two years of unemployment, he finds a job posting bills that requires a bicycle. But his bike is stolen on the first day of his job. With his small son he combs the streets of bombed-out, postwar Rome searching for it with no luck. His will finally broken, he steals a bicycle but is caught in the act.
Wages of Fear (1953) — In an remote, hot and desolate Central American village, four men risk all to get out by accepting an offer from an American oil company to drive two trucks filled with nitroglycerin over treacherous terrain to a well fire.
On the Waterfront (1954) — Marlon Brando is an ex-prize fighter who struggles against himself and union corruption along New York’s grim, wintry, dangerous docks.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) — An angry young man trapped in a mindless factory job in a polluted, down and dirty northern English industrial town spends Saturday nights drinking and Sunday mornings fishing; a rebel without focus.
Norma Rae (1979) — Based on a true story, an uneducated woman fights to improve her own life and deplorable conditions in a southern textile mill.
The Devil’s Miner (2005) — A documentary of two brothers, age 12 and 14, raised without a father in a shanty on the side of a mountain in Bolivia, who scramble through silver mines daily to afford the clothing and supplies needed for their education, the only ticket to escape their bleak destiny.
Mississippi Chicken (2007) — Real-life documentary of an activist working among trailer park Latin Americans employed in poultry plants and who are too scared to cause trouble or alert authorities to workplace abuses.
Encounters at the End of the World (2007) — Another documentary, this one studies the motives and philosophies of marine biologists, physicists, plumbers, and truck drivers who work in extreme conditions as far away from society as one can get at the Antarctic compound of the National Science Foundation.
The Simpsons — (1989 – present) I’m cheating here, of course. This is TV-land. But the follies of Homer the nuke plant operator, his family and buddies, are really no farce; beneath the buffoonery are populist predicaments of work and play. Plus, unlike most “working-class” film central characters, Homer is no victim, no underdog scraper, or stranger in a strange land.
To this list I’d add the following films, which I’ve read about but not seen. Perhaps you have:
Bread and Roses (2001) — The 1990 Service Employees International Union's Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles is depicted through the struggle of an immigrant woman who refuses to believe she cannot win every battle on her own terms.
El Norte (1983) — A young brother and sister journey from their remote Guatemalan village to the promised land of the Los Angeles. Working as a domestic, the sister is puzzled why her employers uses a washing machine. Her brother works his way up from busboy to waiter to the promise of a better job in Chicago, but their past returns to haunt them.
Hard Labour (1973) — Brutally harsh study of an aging Englishwoman and her daily grind cleaning the homes of the wealthy. She returns to her own home each night to face whines and rants from her husband, an alcoholic custodian.
Blue Collar (1978) — Richard Pryor is one of three friends scraping by trying to escape auto assembly line boredom, hazards, and fears of a dead-end future.
OSHA’s reg agenda notable for what’s missing
regulatory agenda, released yesterday, is on taking care of rulemaking initiatives that are old and in the way, causing gridlock and preventing OSHA from beginning to track bigger and more controversial regulatory game.
This strategy makes senses both administratively and politically. Agenda items such as crane and derrick safety; exposures to silica, beryllium, and methyline chloride; walking/working surfaces; and electrical power transmission safety have stagnated in the standards-setting office for years and must be dealt with.
Taking care of this kind of administrative housekeeping also gives the new OSHA chief, Dr. David Michaels, and his leadership team breathing room to carefully consider how to address politically hot issues such as ergonomics, updating hundreds of permissible exposure limits (PELs), and setting basic mandates for workplace injury and illness prevention programs.
Both Barab and his boss, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, repeatedly asserted in live chat webinars yesterday that OSHA has not current plans for having another go at setting an ergo standard. This is a retreat from Barab’s bold comment made earlier this year at the American Society of Safety Engineers’ meeting that it’s time for OSHA to pick up the political football that is ergonomics and run with it, resistance be damned.
Meanwhile, there was no mention on the reg agenda of workplace injury and illness prevention program requirements, one of Dr. Michaels’s stated priorities for OSHA. It’s simply too early in the Obama era at OSHA to take on that comprehensive issue, sure to impact small businesses and cause a political firestorm.
The same goes for updating the PELs. “While the agency has not made a determination about how to proceed at this time, we continue to look at strategies that protect workers from chemical hazards,” was as close as Barab came yesterday to touching the legal complications of justifying new PELs.
“These are very important and complex issues,” said Barab, referring to ergonomics, injury/illness prevention plans, and updating PELs. And he left it at that.
This strategy makes senses both administratively and politically. Agenda items such as crane and derrick safety; exposures to silica, beryllium, and methyline chloride; walking/working surfaces; and electrical power transmission safety have stagnated in the standards-setting office for years and must be dealt with.
Taking care of this kind of administrative housekeeping also gives the new OSHA chief, Dr. David Michaels, and his leadership team breathing room to carefully consider how to address politically hot issues such as ergonomics, updating hundreds of permissible exposure limits (PELs), and setting basic mandates for workplace injury and illness prevention programs.
Both Barab and his boss, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, repeatedly asserted in live chat webinars yesterday that OSHA has not current plans for having another go at setting an ergo standard. This is a retreat from Barab’s bold comment made earlier this year at the American Society of Safety Engineers’ meeting that it’s time for OSHA to pick up the political football that is ergonomics and run with it, resistance be damned.
Meanwhile, there was no mention on the reg agenda of workplace injury and illness prevention program requirements, one of Dr. Michaels’s stated priorities for OSHA. It’s simply too early in the Obama era at OSHA to take on that comprehensive issue, sure to impact small businesses and cause a political firestorm.
The same goes for updating the PELs. “While the agency has not made a determination about how to proceed at this time, we continue to look at strategies that protect workers from chemical hazards,” was as close as Barab came yesterday to touching the legal complications of justifying new PELs.
“These are very important and complex issues,” said Barab, referring to ergonomics, injury/illness prevention plans, and updating PELs. And he left it at that.
OSHA will accomplish little without Obama’s reelection
We’re not even out of 2009, so no one is in the mood to start thinking about another long, drawn-out, media-saturated presidential election battle in 2012. At least outside of Washington. Campaign consultants, party leaders and Potomac Fever gossipers are always on to the next race. It’s the habitual pastime in the nation’s capital.
But if you study the OSHA regulatory agenda issued yesterday by the Department of Labor, two political facts of life strike you. One, even when an administration actually has the will to set new standards, as this one does, it still takes years to grind through the process of small business impact studies, stakeholder meetings, comment periods, public hearings, advance notices, proposals, risk assessments, revisions, more in-house soul-searching and public outreach, and trying to get the Office of Management and Budget and the DOL front office to sign off on a new rule.
Two, due to this grind ‘em out process, it requires two presidential terms, eight years, for an OSHA team (like the present one) that actually wants to be innovative and ambitious to have any chance at achieving even some of its goals.
When you see how relatively innocuous standards proposals such as walking/working surfaces, electrical power transmission safety, and crane and derrick safety have been reprinted for years in the regulatory calendar, you begin to grasp the enormity of the resources and resolve necessary to drive through rules on ergonomics, updating permissible exposure limits, and setting baseline requirements for workplace injury and illness prevention programs.
To be sure, in Washington agencies can always ram through standards at the midnight hour of an expiring administration, as OSHA did in 2000 with the ergo rule and in 1980 before the Reagan administration took control. But not to any lasting effect. The new powers quickly rescind the old orders, as the Bush administration did with the ergo rule months after taking office (with the help of Congress).
It’s no surprise that ergonomics, workplace safety programs, and updating PELs were not listed on the first regulatory calendar published by the Obama Labor Department. Why borrow trouble before you even know how you want to proceed? OSHA chief Dr. David Michaels has just been sworn in. Give him a year to put together a strategy for addressing the Big Three regulatory issues.
Even when they make their initial appearance on the reg calendar, it’s only the start of the long grind toward final standards. That journey through a battlefield of political action ambushes and counterattacks will take oh, perhaps a half-dozen years. And that’s for maybe one of the Big Three to actually become a final rule.
Without a second Obama term, these key OSHA issues will receive all sorts of attention, but not enough traction.
But if you study the OSHA regulatory agenda issued yesterday by the Department of Labor, two political facts of life strike you. One, even when an administration actually has the will to set new standards, as this one does, it still takes years to grind through the process of small business impact studies, stakeholder meetings, comment periods, public hearings, advance notices, proposals, risk assessments, revisions, more in-house soul-searching and public outreach, and trying to get the Office of Management and Budget and the DOL front office to sign off on a new rule.
Two, due to this grind ‘em out process, it requires two presidential terms, eight years, for an OSHA team (like the present one) that actually wants to be innovative and ambitious to have any chance at achieving even some of its goals.
When you see how relatively innocuous standards proposals such as walking/working surfaces, electrical power transmission safety, and crane and derrick safety have been reprinted for years in the regulatory calendar, you begin to grasp the enormity of the resources and resolve necessary to drive through rules on ergonomics, updating permissible exposure limits, and setting baseline requirements for workplace injury and illness prevention programs.
To be sure, in Washington agencies can always ram through standards at the midnight hour of an expiring administration, as OSHA did in 2000 with the ergo rule and in 1980 before the Reagan administration took control. But not to any lasting effect. The new powers quickly rescind the old orders, as the Bush administration did with the ergo rule months after taking office (with the help of Congress).
It’s no surprise that ergonomics, workplace safety programs, and updating PELs were not listed on the first regulatory calendar published by the Obama Labor Department. Why borrow trouble before you even know how you want to proceed? OSHA chief Dr. David Michaels has just been sworn in. Give him a year to put together a strategy for addressing the Big Three regulatory issues.
Even when they make their initial appearance on the reg calendar, it’s only the start of the long grind toward final standards. That journey through a battlefield of political action ambushes and counterattacks will take oh, perhaps a half-dozen years. And that’s for maybe one of the Big Three to actually become a final rule.
Without a second Obama term, these key OSHA issues will receive all sorts of attention, but not enough traction.
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