ThePopTort

Safety Lessons from New York to Texas

What kept going through my mind this morning watching Matt Lauer anchoring the Today Show atop the new One World Trade Center building as the 758-ton spire was hoisted up there (making the tower a symbolic 1776 feet), wasn’t anything very patriotic.  My main thought was, PLEASE DON’T FALL!

I was worried about Matt up there.  I was worried about all the incredible iron workers bolting in that spire.  I was worried about those of us below.  (We’re just a few blocks away.)

But then I remembered that when it comes to the safety of scaffolding, ladders, elevators, etc., New York has among THE safest laws in the nation thanks to New York’s Labor Law, §§240-241.  This law places an absolute duty upon owners and contractors to make scaffolding, ladders and other equipment, as well as flooring and elevators, safe for construction workers. I felt better just thinking about this law, as should have Matt Lauer, those iron workers, and the other 8 million people who live here - not to mention the 40 million who visit.

Notwithstanding the sound legal and policy reasons for making the owner and contractor exclusively responsible for safety at construction sites, business lobbyists have, for years, tried to eliminate that absolute duty and significantly weaken the owners’ and contractors’ obligations to ensure a safe work site.  This would be a terrible idea!  No offense to our Texas friends, but if that state is any guide, aspiring to the lowest common denominator when it comes to public health and safety is not in anyone's best interest. 

The New York Times has a disturbing front page story about Texas’ reaction to the horrific April 17 West Fertilizer plant explosion that killed at least 14 and injured about 200 (and was insured for only $1 million dollars thanks to incredibly poor insurance regulation in that state.  ThePopTort is better insured than that.)

In Texas, lawmakers like Governor Rick Perry and even the town’s mayor see no need for any improved safety laws.  None.  Not even fire codes, which are often banned in Texas!  Writes the Times, 

Texas … is the only state that does not require companies to contribute to workers’ compensation coverage. It boasts the largest city in the country, Houston, with no zoning laws. It does not have a state fire code, and it prohibits smaller counties from having such codes. Some Texas counties even cite the lack of local fire codes as a reason for companies to move there.

But Texas has also had the nation’s highest number of workplace fatalities — more than 400 annually — for much of the past decade. Fires and explosions at Texas’ more than 1,300 chemical and industrial plants have cost as much in property damage as those in all the other states combined for the five years ending in May 2012. …

“The Wild West approach to protecting public health and safety is what you get when you give companies too much economic freedom and not enough responsibility and accountability,” said Thomas O. McGarity, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law and an expert on regulation.…

[F]ederal officials and fire safety experts contend that fire codes and other requirements would probably have made a difference. A fire code would have required frequent inspections by fire marshals who might have prohibited the plant’s owner from storing the fertilizer just hundreds of feet from a school, a hospital, a railroad and other public buildings, they say. A fire code also would probably have mandated sprinklers and forbidden the storage of ammonium nitrate near combustible materials. (Investigators say the fertilizer was stored in a largely wooden building near piles of seed, one possible factor in the fire.)

“It’s tough to overstate the importance fire codes would have made,” said Scott Harris, a former emergency management coordinator in Texas for the Environmental Protection Agency, who is now with UL Workplace Health and Safety, a safety science company. “Texas just hasn’t wrapped its brain around this fact yet.” …

Not that some aren’t trying to help. 

Since the accident, some state lawmakers began calling for increased workplace safety inspections to be paid for by businesses. Fire officials are pressing for stricter zoning rules to keep residences farther away from dangerous industrial sites. But those efforts face strong resistance. …

Resistance from, say, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, “a conservative study group, [who] said that the wrong response to the explosion would be for the state to hire more 'battalions of government regulators who are deployed into industry and presume to know more about running the factory than the people who own the factory and work there every day.'"

Yes, I bet some of the dead knew exactly how to run that plant.  Unfortunately, they’re now dead.

 

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ALEC’s Phony Crony Capitalism

The American Legislative Exchange Council is the secretive organization of conservative lawmakers and corporations that draft and shop around model bills without identifying that these bills are written by national corporate lobbyists. It’s been called many things lately.  Let’s see.  Union buster.  Voter suppresser.  Concealed weapon and shoot to kill champ. Mistreater of asbestos victims.  Abuser of its charitable status.  

We also like Paul Krugman’s descriptive paragraph:

…ALEC’s claim to stand for limited government and free markets is deeply misleading. To a large extent the organization seeks not limited government but privatized government, in which corporations get their profits from taxpayer dollars, dollars steered their way by friendly politicians. In short, ALEC isn’t so much about promoting free markets as it is about expanding crony capitalism. 

That more or less fits ALEC’s civil justice agenda too.  It’s new priorities are listed in a brand new report called ALEC 2013: Jobs, Innovation, and Opportunity in the States, and when it comes to people harmed or killed by corporate wrongdoing, it focuses on three areas: making it more difficult for people injured or killed by unsafe or defective products to hold manufacturers accountable in court; limiting the availability of “class actions,” so that big companies can more successfully violate large numbers of people with impunity; and limiting lawsuits by people who have been defrauded under state consumer protection laws.  All such laws transfer the costs of injuries away from those who caused them and onto others (like taxpayers, when people are severely hurt and need care.)

In other words, ALEC would like to undermine the tort system’s economic function -  deterrence of non cost-justified accidents - replacing it with new rules constraining what is now a free-market approach to holding corporations accountable for their negligence.  (You can read more about the tort system's important economic function in the 1987 book, The Economic Structure of Tort Law by conservative economic theorists William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner.)

So let's add one more ALEC description - subverter of the free market tort system.

Ohio’s Transparently Anti-Victim Asbestos Bill

It was what, maybe 6 months ago, that we posted a story about a federal asbestos bill, the proponents of which publicly argued was “needed” for “transparency,” but what they meant was really this:

OK, we’ve gone out of business and set up underfunded trusts (per bankruptcy laws) to pay compensation to the sick and dying, but the process is just too quick and easy! And that’s especially true for dying mesothelioma patients! So we need to make the process even more onerous by demanding that these trusts greatly increase their unnecessary paperwork, requiring a whole lot of new pointless personal information about victims –meanwhile victims die waiting for what’s owed them.

What we didn’t mention in our post was that this wasn’t just any asbestos bill. This one came Straight Outta ALEC (apologies to N.W.A.) although you’d never know that from the general media coverage of this issue.  ALEC (you may know), or the American Legislative Exchange Council, is the influential, secretive organization that writes state bills to promote the agenda of corporate America. The bill is part of the agenda of ALEC’s very active Civil Justice Task Force, co-chaired by Victor Schwartz, General Counsel for the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA), a corporate group seeking to limit the liability of its corporate members. The legislation generated by this Task Force provides huge legal advantages for our nation’s most negligent and callous companies, many of which have been successfully sued over and over for recklessly causing death and injury to their customers.  (See also, CJ&D’s report, America’s Worst Top Model as well as CJ&D’s Spotlight on Justice on the sordid past of the asbestos industry.) 

While the federal bill ultimately went nowhere in Congress, states influenced by ALEC have been a different story altogether. Yesterday in Ohio, four state senate Republicans joined all 10 Democrats in trying to block this very same bill at the state level, but it wasn’t enough to defeat the legislation, which now moves to Gov. John Kasich’s desk. One of the bill’s major proponents was Sen. Bill Seitz (R-Cincinnati), who co-chairs ALEC’s Civil Justice Task Force with Victor Schwartz.  So there’s that, too.

Writes the Ohio’s Toledo Blade,

Critics of the bill … accused majority Republicans of throwing up more obstacles to asbestos victims, a decade after passing a law that made it tougher for those exposed to the substance to sue.  About 90 percent of some 40,000 asbestos cases pending in Ohio courts at the time were dismissed because the plaintiffs could not demonstrate substantial impairment of their health beyond simple changes in a chest X-ray.

“This legislation is again another example of the 129th General Assembly’s war on Ohio workers,” said Sen. Mike Skindell (D., Lakewood). “It is a piece of legislation brought to us in part by the corporate-influenced American Legislative Exchange Council, otherwise known as ALEC.…

Most manufacturers of products containing asbestos, including Toledo-based Owens Corning, long ago went through federal bankruptcy proceedings that resulted in the creation of more than 60 trusts against which asbestos victims could make claims. This bill is primarily focused on aiding other companies like Perrysburg-based Owens-Illinois that did not go through bankruptcy and are still fighting asbestos-related lawsuits more than 40 years after the fibrous substance was pulled from the market.

The Asbestos Victims Coalition is asking people to call Governor Kasich today. It’s urgent.  Here’s their statement. Once again, it all comes down to Ohio.

Wal Mart et al. - Retailing for Holiday Safety

As always this time of year, there are boatloads of stories about callous toy manufacturers insisting that U.S. children have available to them playthings that might harm or kill them. (See, e.g., surveys from the consumer group PIRG and from the American Association for Justice.) Just the morning, the Today Show devoted an entire segment to Consumer Product Safety Commission and federal law enforcement efforts to keep unsafe toys from getting onto shelves at Wal Mart and other retailers, and into the tiny hands – and stomachs- of our nation’s kids. (See below.) 

But what’s been interesting this year is that in addition to toy safety stories, there have been a number of stories focusing on worker conditions at retail outlets - and even more sadly, on the hazardous overseas plants supplying U.S. consumers with cheap goods. Let’s start with this country.

You may have heard about the 100-city Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday Wal Mart strike prompted by working conditions, including forcing workers to work Thanksgiving Day. In addition, there’s an article today in The Recorder about class-actions against Wal Mart and K-Mart by cashiers who have been denied “suitable seating”, in violation of California law.  This week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals “agreed to review class certification of roughly 22,000 Wal-Mart cashiers in California who claim they were denied a place to sit in violation of state labor regulations.… Meanwhile, U.S. District Judge William Alsup concluded a bench trial last week in a similar case against Kmart Corp. That case focused on 65 cashiers employed by one Kmart store in the Central Valley city of Tulare and maximum penalties of less than $500,000.”

But when it comes to tales of outright calamity and heartbreak, nothing comes close this holiday season to the fire last week at a Bangladesh clothing factory, which killed 112 people as 1,400 workers (70% women) were trapped inside a building with locked doors and no emergency exists: 

An Associated Press reporter at the factory discovered children's shorts with Wal-Mart's Faded Glory label, hooded sweat shirts emblazoned with Disney cartoons, shorts with hip-hop star Sean Combs' ENYCE tag, and sweaters from the French company Teddy Smith and the Scottish company Edinburgh Woollen Mill.

Sears was among the companies listed in the account books. Wal-Mart said it received a safety audit that showed the factory was "high-risk" and had decided well before the blaze to stop doing business with Tazreen. But it said a supplier had continued to use Tazreen without authorization. The retailer said it stopped doing business with the supplier Monday. Sears said it learned after the blaze that its merchandise was being produced there without its approval through a vendor that has since been fired.

Walt Disney Co., which licenses its characters to clothing makers, said its records indicate that none of its licensees have been permitted to make Disney-brand products at the factory for at least a year.

Harold Meyerson at the Washington Post wrote of the fire and these corporate excuses in a poignant column: 

In its gruesome particulars — locked doors, no emergency exits, workers leaping to their deaths — the blaze seems a ghastly centennial reenactment of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, when 146 workers similarly jumped to their deaths or were incinerated after they found the exit doors were locked. …

If this were an isolated incident of Wal-Mart denying responsibility for the conditions under which the people who make and move its products labor, then the Bangladeshi disaster wouldn’t reflect quite so badly on the company. But the very essence of the Wal-Mart system is to employ thousands upon thousands of workers through contractors and subcontractors and sub-subcontractors, who are compelled by Wal-Mart’s market power and its demand for low prices to cut corners and skimp on safety. And because Wal-Mart isn’t the employer of record for these workers, the company can disavow responsibility for their conditions of work.

This system isn’t reserved just for workers in faraway lands: Tens of thousands of American workers labor under similar arrangements. Many are employed at little more than the minimum wage in the massive warehouses in the inland exurbs of Los Angeles, where Wal-Mart’s imports from Asia are trucked from the city’s harbor to be sorted and packaged and put on the trucks and trains that take them to Wal-Mart stores for a thousand miles around. …

Other discount retailers — notably Costco and Trader Joe’s — pay their workers far more, train them more extensively, have much lower rates of turnover and much higher rates of sales per employee, according to a Harvard Business Review article by Zeynep Ton of the MIT Sloan School of Management. Costco is a very profitable business, but Wal-Mart maintains an even higher profit margin, which it achieves by underpaying its employees. The conservative economic blogger Megan McArdle estimates that if Wal-Mart held its profit margin down to Costco’s level, its average worker would make about $2,850 more each year — a considerable increase in a sector where workers’ earnings average less than $25,000 a year. But Wal-Mart neither pays its own nor takes responsibility for those who make and move its wares.

For America’s largest private-sector employer, the emergency exits are always open.

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The Real Fraudsters

If you happen to live in a black or Latino neighborhood in a swing-state city like Cleveland, Ohio, you may have noticed Clear Channel’s screaming “Voter Fraud is a Felony” billboards. These billboards, “'stigmatize the African-American community by implying that voter fraud is a more significant problem in African American neighborhoods than elsewhere,’ [even though voter fraud is a myth ] and the billboards ‘attach an implicit threat of criminal prosecution to the civic act of voting.’”  The cowardly rich folks who paid for these billboards won’t come forward. Of course not.

We bring this up because one of the burdens of being disadvantaged in the country is having to live with the indignity of being regularly accused of committing fraud.  Yet, it’s the power elite themselves who commit most of it – and often victimizing the disadvantaged while doing it. 

Workers compensation is another example.  In the early 1990s, insurers and businesses began trumpeting up distorted rhetoric around the idea of “fraudulent” workers’ compensation claims, greatly exaggerating the extent of the problem (maybe 1 to 2 percent of claims).  Yet fraud is most likely caused not by workers, but by employers - underreporting payroll, declaring employees as independent contractors, misclassifying occupations, and misrepresenting claims experience.  See more here.

There’s no area where that’s more true than health care fraud.  For example, on Thursday, AP reported on the U.S. Justice Dept.'s announcement of another big health care fraud settlement, specifically,

Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc. will pay $95 million to settle allegations that the company promoted three drugs for uses that were not medically accepted.… Thursday's announcement is the latest in a series of settlements with pharmaceutical companies engaging in so-called off-label marketing. In the law enforcement initiative's biggest case, GlaxoSmithKline agreed to pay $3 billion and pleaded guilty to promoting two popular drugs for unapproved uses and to failing to disclose important safety information on a third.

See more here.

Also this week,

The owner of a Miami health care agency was sentenced on Oct. 23, 2012 to 37 months in prison for his participation in a $60 million home health Medicare fraud scheme … Rodolfo Nieto, Jr., 40, of Miami …was the owner and operator of Ronat Home Health Care Inc. According to court documents… from approximately January 2006 to approximately November 2009, Nieto accepted kickbacks in return for recruiting Medicare beneficiaries to be placed at Nany Home Health Inc., a Miami home health agency that purported to provide home health care and physical therapy services to eligible Medicare beneficiaries. The owners and operators of Nany paid Nieto kickbacks in return for allowing Nany to bill the Medicare program on behalf of the patients Nieto had recruited through Ronat. Specifically, as part of the scheme, Nany billed Medicare for home health services purportedly provided by Ronat.

Joining the crowd, “A Dover [DE] psychiatrist who was accused of improperly prescribing painkillers and defrauding the state’s Medicaid program admitted guilt today and was fined and sentenced to a year in prison."

It never seems to stop.  In fact, that was the message of a Today Show segment today, finding that, "Federal agents arrest a health care fraudster nearly every day, charging close to 1,500 people last year alone.”  In many cases, these crooks are billing Medicare for services never provided, and “victims are elderly and disadvantaged.”

If you see Medicare fraud, HHS is asking you to call its tip line: 1 800 hhs tips.  I would image a good tip might be a doctor who bills Medicare for tests that are not "medically indicated or for the health of the patient." They like to call such tests “defensive medicine.” Actually, it’s fraud.  

That number again? 1 800 hhs tips. 

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California’s Magic Number Shapes Next Wal-Mart Class Action

Class actions are a vital tool for holding accountable corporations that profit by violating a large number of people.  Emphasis on large number of people.  In other words, if your employer at the local deli withholds wages from you and your fellow “sandwich artists,” you probably don’t have a class action.  In “class action” parlance, that’s called the “numerosity requirement" and usually, the question that worries lawyers is: is the number “large enough”?  Although I should say that by “worry,” I do note that in the view of some (like class action attorney blogger Russell Jackson), this requirement has never gotten the respect it deserves:

As I have lamented in this space before, too many people (courts, lawyers, litigants) treat numerosity as a throw-away requirement.  If there are potentially more than some magic number of claimants (often 40 or 100), some treat numerosity as "established" and can get very upset if a defendant won't concede it.

Whether or not that’s true, one thing’s for sure.  “Large enough” isn’t the only issue to worry about these days. “Too large” has become a front and center concern thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2011 decision, Wal-Mart vs. Dukes (which we last covered here  and here.)  In that case, national discrimination against female Walmart employees created too large a class.  We said then, “there is no longer any financial incentive for massive employers like Wal-Mart to settle with victims and stop pervasive discrimination like this."

OK we admit, that may have been an over-reaction – but only a little one.  Thanks to a federal court decision last Friday, the number of female employees discriminated against by Walmart California is, indeed, just right.  Yippy!  Writes the San Francisco Chronicle:

A statewide discrimination suit against Walmart on behalf of at least 100,000 current and former female employees has survived its first test in federal court, more than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed a nationwide sex-bias suit against the retail giant.

The California case is an offshoot of the national class action that was filed in San Francisco federal court in 2001 on behalf of as many as 1.6 million Walmart employees. Like the earlier case, this suit accuses the company of systematically discriminating against women - who, according to the plaintiffs' experts, were paid less than men and promoted less often.…

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled Friday that the high court had not foreclosed state or regional class actions against Walmart if workers could show they were victims of a uniform policy of discrimination.

He cited the plaintiffs' claims that all California store managers are required to attend training sessions where they are cautioned that women may not be qualified for promotion. Those allegations, if proven, would help to show a "culture and philosophy of gender bias," Breyer said.

More from Bloomberg, here.  So Walmart, numerosity requirement?  Check.  Next stop February, when Judge Breyer will decide if the class will be certified.  We'll keep you posted!

Insurance Delays and Incongruous Courts

Let’s tackle the good news first.

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from Louisiana Citizens Property Insurance Corporation.  This appeal followed a Louisiana Supreme Court decision upholding a local court decision ordering Citizens to pay $105 million in penalities to thousands of policyholders it harmed after Hurricane Katrina.  Citizens had been set-up in 2003 as a state-sponsored “insurer of last resort” to provide homeowners insurance to those who could not find coverage in the private market. You will no doubt recall that following the 2005 storm, many individuals were left destitute, without food, water or a roof over their heads.  As this report showed, Citizens policyholders had a particularly horrendous time – probably the worst of anyone - trying to file claims or get them paid.  And that’s saying something.  Citizens has the money, but says it’s gong to continue to try to fight this in federal court. 

Now, unfortunately, the bad news. On Friday, the Texas Supreme Court issued a shocking 5-4 decision, which completely eradicates the rights of injured workers to sue workers’ compensation insurance carriers that act in bad faith, suddenly overturning decades-long Texas law.  Writes the Austin American-Statesman:

The 5-4 decision favored Texas Mutual Insurance Co. of Austin, the state's largest workers' compensation insurance carrier. The case was one in which Texas Mutual had initially denied an injured worker's claim, saying he was hurt playing softball and not at work, before the company eventually settled the case.

The worker, Timothy Ruttiger of Galveston, later sued the insurance company, claiming the delay in getting his benefits damaged his credit, worsened his hernias and caused mental anguish, pain and suffering.

A Houston jury awarded Ruttiger $173,500, plus attorney fees, but last summer the Texas Supreme Court ruled that Ruttiger take nothing under the insurance code and deceptive trade practices law. But the higher court sent back the bad-faith claim for reconsideration by a Houston appellate court.

Before the appellate court acted, the Supreme Court granted a request for a rehearing.

On Friday, the decision eliminated the bad-faith provision that had been law for 23 years. …

Alex Winslow with the Texas Watch Foundation's Court Watch project said that the decision is another example of the Supreme Court's conservative activism.

“Five robed justices have gone out of their way to second-guess the clear and decades-long intent of the Legislature,” he said in a news release.

Read more from Texas Watch here.  And then go read this book.

The Newest Energy Worker Hazard - Highway Crashes

This week, the House is set to vote on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) – i.e., defense reauthorization for 2013.  There’s no shortage of controversy about this bill (indefinite military detentions anyone?) but provisions that would gut health and safety protections for workers at Department of Energy weapons sites clearly isn’t getting the same kind of attention.  

That's not unusual.  Except for coverage of the occasional national catastrophe, worker safety in this country’s ultra-hazardous energy industry isn't something to which enough people pay attention.  So we’ll thank the New York Times today for its enormous front page story about oil and gas industry workers. As dangerous as the work itself is, workers – many of whom are not unionized - are being killed in new ways you can’t even believe.  Specifically:

Over the past decade, more than 300 oil and gas workers … were killed in highway crashes, the largest cause of fatalities in the industry. Many of these deaths were due in part to oil field exemptions from highway safety rules that allow truckers to work longer hours than drivers in most other industries, according to safety and health experts.

Many oil field truckers say that while these exemptions help them earn more money, they are routinely used to pressure workers into driving after shifts that are 20 hours or longer.

And the problem is only getting worse.

According to federal officials, more than 200,000 new oil and gas wells will be drilled nationwide over the next decade. And the drilling technique used at more than 90 percent of these wells, known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, leads to far more trucks on the road — roughly 500 to 1,500 truck trips per well — than traditional drilling, partly because fracking requires millions of gallons of water per well.

The new drilling has been an economic boon to the country, adding millions of dollars in local tax revenues and royalty payments and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, many of them providing high pay to unskilled laborers in areas with double-digit unemployment.

But the jobs are also hazardous, with fatality rates that are seven times the national average across all industries. Nearly a third of the 648 deaths of oil field workers from 2003 through 2008 were in highway crashes, according to the most recent data analyzed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By contrast, highway crashes caused roughly a fifth of workplace fatalities across all industries in 2010.

It’s not just that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is under-resourced.  It’s that, according to one OSHA official, the law is terribly weak - specifically,

"[C]ompanies were not required to alert his agency when their truckers crashed on public roads. Nor do they have to inform his agency when drilling starts, making timely inspections difficult.”

By contrast, mining companies are required to alert the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration about new sites. While there are far fewer active oil and gas drilling sites in the country than underground and surface mining sites, more drilling industry workers than miners typically die each year.

What's more, driver fatigue is only part of the problem. 

Oil and gas workers also crash because their trucks are frequently in disrepair, the police say. … Oil service companies also often circumvent highway safety rules. …

In March, the Government Accountability Office criticized federal highway regulators for their failure to detect commercial truckers — widely known as “chameleon carriers” — that use shell companies to get around safety rules.

Even if you’re not an oil/gas worker, you need to care about this because - just guessing - you’ve probably shared the road with a large truck at some point in your life. 

Workin' Woes in Wyoming

Wyoming isn't nicknamed the “Equality State” for nothing. It’s the first state to grant women the right to vote (1869).  The first woman was elected to statewide office there in 1894!  Compare that to the sorry record of a big state like New York.  But I wish I could say the same about the rights of workers in the great state of Equality.   

Today, the New York Times is reporting on a pretty shocking report identifying “Wyoming, with its growing oil, gas and mining industries, [a]s one of the most dangerous places in the United States to work.”

Dr. Timothy Ryan, an epidemiologist, was hired by the state to study this problem and has since quit because of inaction by the state.  His report, issued January 3, says, among other things:

Over the last year I have analyzed 17 years of occupational fatality data (1992-2008), read through fatality case reports, and have spoken with hundreds of employees working for various sized companies in the major industries in Wyoming.  The common theme throughout is the lack of a “culture of safety” in Wyoming. Safety occurs as an afterthought. Greater than 85% of the fatality reports indicate that safety procedures were not followed. …

 Wyoming averaged a fatality every ten days over the last ten years.

What's more, he notes, “Currently, OSHA inspections occur annually in less than 2% of Wyoming establishments. The inspections that do occur are primarily based on known incidents, employee  complaints and those companies with a high level of workmen’s compensation claims.” 

Writes the Times,

The report also noted that Wyoming had the highest workplace fatality rate in the country for all but one year from 2003 through 2008. In 2010, the last year that data was provided, Wyoming’s estimated occupational death rate was three and a half times the national average, the report said. …

To be sure, Wyoming’s oil and gas boom, which began in the 1990s, has drawn thousands of people with high-paying but dangerous jobs. In August, three workers were killed in Converse County after an explosion at an oil storage site. …

Oil and gas rig workers and their families are often itinerant, hold little political clout and fear that reporting safety problems could get them fired, said Laurie Goodman, a Wyoming lobbyist who has worked on occupational safety issues.

As we’ve noted before and is addressed at length in this Center for Justice & Democracy report, because the workers comp system fails to keep employers on any kind of legal "hook" for these conditions, the system itself perpetuates a culture of non-safety. The paper reports,

In 2009, Ms. Goodman and worker advocates tried unsuccessfully to get state lawmakers to pass a bill that would have made it easier for workers to file lawsuits after an accident.

“We have a system where there’s no accountability, where the employer has no incentive to be responsive,” said John Vincent, a former mayor of Riverton, who has represented the families of dead and injured oil and gas workers in his law practice and has worked on the legislative effort. “People are afraid to sue. They won’t report injuries. They’ll just stay at home until they get better.” …

 “It seems like people die out there all the time. They’re leaving wives and children,” Ms. [Natlie] Moss, [whose young husband was killed] said. “What 26-year-old should have to plan a funeral?”

Indeed. 

Fair Warning – When Worker Safety Ain’t Blow’ In the Wind

If you’re feeling a little lazy over the holidays and the corporate attacks on our judiciary (including publishing judges’ photos to alert every extreme-right wingnut in America – shameful, ATRA) isn’t quite enough to get your juices boiling again, I’ve got just the trick.  Check out the new journalistic endeavor from former Los Angeles Times award-winning investigative journalist Myron Levin, called Fair Warning, a non-profit news web site covering the latest “news of safety, health and corporate conduct."

We remember Levin at the LA Times, of course, covering everything from the tobacco industry (“The country’s leading smokers’ rights group has built a fat war chest despite minimal support from the 3 million people it claims as members, according to public records and internal documents that suggest its only significant backer is Big Tobacco.” ) to auto safety (“How much should General Motors Corp. spend to keep people from burning to death in fiery crashes? In a memo nearly 30 years ago, a young GM engineer, Edward C. Ivey, suggested that the answer was: Not much.”) to dishonest PR tactics behind the so-called “tort reform” movement ( “Legal Urban Legends Hold Sway; Tall tales of outrageous jury awards have helped bolster business-led campaigns to overhaul the civil justice system.”)

Fair Warning breaks new ground with stories like today’s expose of the wind power biz, which “has fallen short on worker safety.”  To say the least.   Writes Levin,

Thousands of the giant wind machines violate a federal requirement to give technicians who work inside the towers enough maneuvering space to get up and down their ladders safely. The standard says the space near the ladder should be free of permanent obstructions that could cause serious head or back injuries if a climber slips or is moving fast...

Two field technicians have sought to draw attention to the issue, saying they were stunned by the prevalence of the problem.

“Between my friends and I … we’ve been in thousands of wind turbines and haven’t found one that’s compliant with this issue,” said Ed Oliver, 47, of Dana Point, Calif.

Let’s just say that the treatment of these technicians - who are trying to save workers from serious injury or death and even offered the industry “their own version of a safety device” - has much to be desired, while OSHA has no idea what it’s doing.

Brian Sturtecky, OSHA’s area director in Jacksonville, Fla., and chairman of its wind energy task force, said enforcement activity is on hold while OSHA prepares a “Letter of Interpretation” to clarify how the standard will be applied.

The result could be a mandate for the industry to retrofit thousands of towers. Or, the industry could get a pass if the agency decides the hazard can be controlled by other measures, such as training.

The task force is examining other safety issues in the industry in the wake of some serious accidents.

In August, 2007, a worker was killed and another injured in the collapse of a tower at a wind farm near Wasco, Ore. Also, OSHA fined Outland Energy Services $378,000 for safety violations after an employee suffered serious electrical burns at an Illinois wind farm in October, 2010.

Fair Warning, which should be on your "must read" list for 2012, stands in the best muckraking tradition of Lincoln Steffans and populist tradition of Woody Guthrie.  We even think Dylan would be proud.