I've been in training all week. Lots and lots of reading about strategic planning and how it all relates to an agency's over all mission. This brought me to the Department of Labor's mission and their mission statement:

The Department of Labor fosters and promotes the welfare of the job seekers, wage earners, and retirees of the United States by improving their working conditions, advancing their opportunities for profitable employment, protecting their retirement and health care benefits, helping employers find workers, strengthening free collective bargaining, and tracking changes in employment, prices, and other national economic measurements. In carrying out this mission, the Department administers a variety of Federal labor laws including those that guarantee workers’ rights to safe and healthful working conditions; a minimum hourly wage and overtime pay; freedom from employment discrimination; unemployment insurance; and other income support.

I highlighted the pieces in the mission statement most important to this blog post. After sitting through 3 days of strategic planning and hearing all about how fantastic the Department of Labor's Strategic plan is, it really got me to wondering how it is that DoL behaves like this:

A copy of a eleventh-hour proposed rule that would make it harder to set new safety rules limiting workers' exposure to chemicals on the job has been obtained by the Washington Post.

The Labor Department has refused to discuss or disclose the proposal, which has spurred anger and condemnation from unions, Democrats in Congress and public health scientists. They claim the rule is a "midnight regulation" that will block the next administration's efforts to reduce workers illnesses and deaths.

Okay, the Post caught my attention, it's true, they did. But here's the money quote for me from the same article:

The proposal calls for adding another procedural step and round of challenges before the department can consider regulations for a workplace toxin. It also challenges the agency's longstanding assumption that it should set limits low enough to protect workers who could be exposed to a toxin every day on the job and work for 45 years.

Pretty freaking cool, huh? Well, take a look at the Strategic Plan for the DoL, Performance Goal 3A:

Improve workplace safety and health through compliance assistance and enforcement of occupational safety and health regulations and standards.

The Department's efforts to protect workers' safety and health are built on the foundation of a strong, fair, and effective enforcement program and outreach, education, compliance assistance and voluntary cooperative programs. Although the Department seeks to assist the large majority of employers who want to meet their obligations under its worker protection laws, it will direct its enforcement resources to those who expose employees to serious hazards. DOL will conduct its inspection programs to ensure that they identify the most hazardous workplaces and make the best use of inspection resources. DOL will also continue to make available effective compliance assistance programs and tools and offer employers and employees opportunities to participate in a variety of voluntary cooperative programs. Through these efforts DOL strives to improve workplace safety and health protections and prevent occupational injuries, illnesses and fatalities.

The Department will continue to use a balanced approach to protect the safety and health of America's workers. The Department's OSHA regulations and standards will continue to be developed or revised under the agency's focused regulatory agenda. DOL will continue to direct inspections and outreach at establishments and industries with the highest injury, illness, and fatality rates and will respond to complaints of serious workplace hazards. As part of the Department's outreach effort, selected sites with high injury and illness rates will be notified in writing of available services for addressing workplace hazards. Small business employers who receive notification will be provided an opportunity to seek assistance through the free, DOL-funded State Consultation Program. These efforts will be supplemented by National and Local Emphasis Programs designed to target unsafe conditions or high hazard industries. To complement its enforcement and standard-setting activities, the Department will provide compliance assistance, outreach, and training for employers and employees. DOL also offers a variety of cooperative programs including the Voluntary Protection Programs (VPP), the Alliance Program, the Strategic Partnership Program, the Consultation Program and its Safety and Health Achievement Recognition Program (SHARP), under which employers, employees, and other stakeholders work with the Department to improve workplace safety and health.

Experience demonstrates that the implementation of VPP principles results in a significant reduction in injury and illness rates. Overall, VPP participants experience an average of 50 percent fewer injuries and illnesses than non-VPP sites within their respective industries, and continued participation in VPP maintains these results. Both a 2005 Gallup study and OSHA's experiences in the Challenge Pilot support these findings.

First off, check out those bolded areas. I went through and pointed out something a little odd. The Department of Labor's mission:

fosters and promotes the welfare of the job seekers, wage earners, and retirees of the United States by improving their working conditions

It says nothing about the employer. Instead, the goals and objectives in their strategic plan does. It means that the Department of Labor has a mission that no longer relates to their strategic plan. That mis-alignment needs to be adjusted and how is DoL adjusting this mis-alignment, well, by suggesting new regulations to curtail the ability of workers to obtain safe workplaces, again, from the Post:

Political appointees at the Department of Labor are moving with unusual speed to push through in the final months of the Bush administration a rule making it tougher to regulate workers' on-the-job exposure to chemicals and toxins.

>snip<

The change would address long-standing complaints from businesses that the government overestimates the risk posed by job exposure to chemicals.

The rule would also require the agency to take an extra step before setting new limits on chemicals in the workplace by allowing an additional round of challenges to agency risk assessments.

The department's speed in trying to make the regulatory change contrasts with its reluctance to alter workplace safety rules over the past 7 1/2 years. In that time, the department adopted only one major health rule for a chemical in the workplace, and it did so under a court order.

DoL no longer sees it's mission as one of protecting workers. It's mission is:

Today, that mission continues in a vastly different, global context. While the interests of wage earners remain a core value for the Department, its policies and programs have evolved to address the emerging needs of workers and employers in a competitive 21st Century economy.

I suppose I should be thrilled that DoL can have the balls to tell us they intend to screw us and do so right there, in their strategic plan, but you know, I'm not thrilled. Instead, I just feel screwed and, not in a good way.

So, let's give a few cheers to Elaine Chao, Secretary of the Department of Labor. PSSSTT, the Cheer here is, Shame,Shame Shame Elaine. Shame on you.

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I worked my way through college selling makeup at a fancy-schmancy department store. So whenever I start in about the terrible working conditions, hours, wages, and unfair treatment--and how much we needed a union-- the eye-rolling usually starts after a few seconds.

Yeah, yeah, I know--it wasn't backbreaking manual labor, and my life and limbs weren't (usually) in danger. But we have to get away from the kind of thinking that says only those who do the most difficult and dangerous work need a union, and that everyone else should just quit whining. Especially when retail workers are a huge part of the service sector, the fastest growing sector in the American economy. And especially when a large percentage of those retail workers are female, and face special hardships at work due to extra obligations to children and family.

When I worked at the department store, which I shall not name, I was just a college kid. So I suffered through because I figured it was just a temporary miserableness. But many of my fellow workers were lifers, talented salespeople or makeup artists, and often the sole or primary breadwinner for their families. And what they needed, though they would never have even thought of it, was a voice in the workplace, speaking out for them. A union voice, to help them improve their wages, benefits, and working conditions.

I saw pregnant women not allowed to sit on stools or chairs, forced on busy days to stand for five or six hours at a time before being allowed to take a break. I saw women forced to carry heavy boxes and equipment every morning, and I also saw plenty of older women with back problems and knee problems doing the same. I saw a co-worker cut her hand open on a piece of jagged glass in our display case, the same piece of glass that we'd complained about endlessly and gotten no response on until the injury. Another co-worker accidentally dropped a heavy table on my leg, and the first thing I was asked to do when the managers all came running was to sign a waiver that the company was not responsible. I did so, not knowing any better, because my leg hurt and I wanted to go to the doctor as soon as possible to check it out--and they wouldn't let me go until I'd signed. (I still have a scar from that injury.) When a serial rapist was on the loose in my town, attacking women in mall parking lots, management still refused to let us women park close to the building, forcing us instead to walk alone in the dark as late as midnight across a deserted parking lot to get to our cars.

And there were other hurts, too--not physical but mental. We were constantly threatened with firing for everything: not opening credit cards, not forcing customers to buy "add-ons" that the company stuck on our counters, not sucking up to the right manager or the right boss. In fact, you could be fired because another co-worker made up something about you--and believe me, in an all female environment, there's a lot of that going on. Management liked to promote conflict between the female workers, because they believed it made us more productive sales people. If we didn't like each other, we wouldn't "stand around chatting," in the words of one of my bosses. As if women weren't intersted in making money, or doing a good job--nope, we were just a bunch of chatterboxes, us crazy females.

No matter how long you were there or how hard you worked, you might never get a promotion, based solely on who liked you and who didn't. You never got the hours you wanted, there was no such thing as a set schedule, and quarterly raises were about 5 cents an hour. (They could, of course, be more, depending on your performance review, but somehow no one ever had a good performance review.) If you got scheduled for rotten hours, you might not make any money at all besides your (very low) base pay.

We had to work on every major holiday or shopping day, were not allowed to take a whole weekend off unless we used vacation hours, and even then it was only allowed during "non-blackout days," as if our lives were some sort of frequent flyer exemption. I missed weddings, funerals, family gatherings, and most of all, holiday time with my family. And at least I didn't have children, unlike many of my co-workers, who missed an awful lot of precious weekend and holiday time with their kids. One older women who retired when I was there told me, "This will be the first day-after-Thanksgiving I've gotten to sleep in and spend with my family for thirty five years. "

All this was, like I said, bearable because I knew it would eventually end. And I thought there was no remedy. This is how it was. Life was unfair, bosses were unfair, and most people couldn't afford health care. (You sure couldn't afford it at my workplace...I didn't know anyone who had health care through our company.) But once I started working at the United Food and Commerical Workers, I had a very different perspective. Suddenly I was outraged. I wanted to go back in time, to tell my co-workers that we did have a choice--we didn't have to be resigned to unfair treatment and crappy working conditions, to being bullied and recieving very little compensation.

I can't go back in time. But I am thrilled to be organizing retail workers, women and men, who deserve better at work. This is something that we're doing a lot more of these days at the UFCW, and it's such important just to LET retail workers know that there is a remedy for what they suffer at work. Better wages, working conditions, and equal pay for equal work were issues championed in the early days of the UFCW movement and are still extremely important to improving the lives of workers today.

UFCW has members at stores like Macy’s, Bloomingdale's, Saks 5th Avenue, and other retail giants--members who are realizing the strength they have when they stick together and demand fair treatment. One of our local unions, RWDSU/UFCW Local 1102 recently organized 1,000 new H&M workers at nine Manhattan stores. Through UFCW representation, the new members will have an opportunity to negotiate innovative employment standards, in addition to wage and benefit improvements, including a partnership for engaging in socially and environmentally responsible programs. And we're only expanding organizing retail workers from here.

After all, every worker deserves a safe and secure job--a job that pays the bills and allows them to raise a family. It's only fair.

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What's going on with worker safety?

From Local 10 News

The crane was mounted to the roof of a building at 19600 Turnberry Way when it collapsed at about 10:20 a.m. Thursday.

Local 10's Rob Schmidt reported that a large crane was handing off a piece of air-conditioning equipment to a smaller crane when it somehow collapsed, injuring the two workers

That's 2 more injured due to a crane accident. What's going on?

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This Wednesday, I saw a blog posting on combustible dust. This posting deals with OSHA’s lack of rules in relation to combustible dust. And the posting has all kinds of linky-goodness to multiple sites, including a petition.


Dustexplosions.blogspot has a good primer on the issue:

First off, lets all understand and be in complete agreement that combustible dusts are a subset of combustible particulate solids (CPS). In its raw form combustible dusts did not arrive at the facility rear loading docks. Instead combustible particulate solids were trucked in. That’s where the Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) enter the picture, since these documents communicate the potential hazards of handling combustible particulate solids, which in their initial packaged state are mostly not hazardous at all.

For instance, after the facility receives the combustible particulate solids, the solid is then transformed into a finished product. During the production phase, which can include such activities as shipping, handling, conveying, mixing, pulverizing, etc. It's during this phase that combustible dusts are generated and a potential hazardous atmosphere can develop when minimum explosive concentrations (MEC) are partnered with a minimum ignition energy (MIE) to produce a potential explosion or fire.

The House Committee on Education and Labor will be discussing this legislation this Wednesday morning. Let your representatives know how you feel about work place safety. You can read the bill here

For more specific information about this issue, I’d suggest you take a look at the following sites:
http://dustexplosions.blogspot.com/
http://oshaunderground.blogspot.com/
United Support and Memorial for Workplace Fatalities
Joe’s Union-Review
Googlemap of combustible gas explosions

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