A coalition of occupational health and safety experts submitted an amicus brief to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) last Thursday, urging the Board to reconsider its restrictive definition of “joint employer” for purposes of collective bargaining.  It’s a critical issue for workers as more and more are getting jobs through temp firms, staffing agencies, and other complex employment relationships.  The workers who got your last-minute Father’s Day gift from the Amazon warehouse to your front door, for instance, don’t all get paychecks from Amazon, but they all operate at “Prime” speed because Amazon demands it.

From a health and safety perspective, it’s important that laws like the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act) are interpreted broadly because the remedial purposes of those statutes – to ensure all workers can collectively bargain for better working conditions …

Cross-posted from The Pump Handle.

Luis Castaneda Gomez, 34 and Jesus Martinez Benitez, 32 were asphyxiated in June 2011 when they were doing repairs inside a manhole. Their employer, Triangle Grading and Paving, was hired by the City of Durham, NC to make water line repairs. The firm had a history of violating worker safety regulations. Worse yet, it was not the first time an employee of Triangle Grading was killed on-the-job.

Durham, like most municipalities, did not have effective policies in place to guard against giving business to safety scofflaws. But that changed in Durham when it adopted a policy in 2012 requiring all bidders to provide information on their safety performance.

This example and many others are described in Winning Safer Workplaces: A Manual for State and Local Policy Reform. Liz Borkowski and I wrote the guide, along with the Center for Progressive Reform’s …

Thousands of U.S. workers die on the job each year, the victims of unsafe workplaces. Countless more are injured, some permanently disabled, or exposed to toxic substances that could eventually harm or kill them. While the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has made progress to improve workplace safety since Congress passed the OSH Act in 1971, a new advocacy manual from the Center for Progressive Reform focuses on the progress on worker safety issues  likely to come at the state and local levels, far from the general dysfunction in Washington.

Winning Safer Workplaces: A Manual for State and Local Policy Reform, written by a team of lawyers and public health researchers, offers local advocacy groups a series of policy proposals, all ripe for enactment by state legislatures, city or county councils, or state or local agencies.

In releasing the manual, CPR President Rena Steinzor — my …

In Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, seven members of the Supreme Court upheld the most important feature of the EPA’s Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) program: the ability to require the vast majority of new and modified sources to install the “Best Available Control Technology” for reducing greenhouse gases (GHGs).  As a consequence, eighty-three percent of significant new and modified sources will continue to be subject to the BACT requirement for their GHG emissions. Although the Court reversed, by a five-to-four vote, EPA’s contention that greenhouse gas emissions alone could trigger the PSD program, that reversal will have little impact because it will eliminate PSD requirements for only about three percent of significant stationary GHG sources.  Justice Scalia’s majority opinion had some choice words for EPA, but it remains to be seen whether those words spell trouble for newly emerging climate regulations.

The …

Co-authored with David L. Markell.

Enforcement is widely acknowledged to be an indispensable feature of effective governance in the world of environmental protection and elsewhere. Unfortunately, criticisms of the U.S. government’s efforts to enforce the environmental laws began almost with the inception of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) more than forty years ago – and they continue virtually unabated today.

In a 2012 report, for example, the U.S. Government Accountability Office(GAO) noted that “EPA has reported that it is not achieving all of the environmental and public health benefits it expected . . . because of substantial rates of noncompliance.” Former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson acknowledged in 2009 that “the level of significant non-compliance” with various Clean Water Act requirements had grown “unacceptably high.” Even EPA’s enforcement office has admitted significant shortcomings, noting that “violations are . . . too widespread, and enforcement too uneven.”

Assessments have found serious …

Direct implications are limited, but we'll be reading the tea leaves for future implications.

Scholars, lawyers, and judges will be spending a lot of time dissecting today’s ruling.   Overall, it’s a bit like yesterday’s World Cup game — EPA didn’t win outright but it didn’t lose either.

Here are three key questions with some initial thoughts:

What is the direct legal impact of the ruling?  This was really a split decision.  Some sources will escape being covered by EPA’s greenhouse gas rule, but most sources (over 80%, according to the Court) remain covered.  So EPA can claim that it gained more than it lost from the decision.  It is also important to note that seven Justices have now confirmed the ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA that the Clean Air Act covers greenhouse gases.  The Court also failed to review, and thereby …

Power plants are not only one of the nation’s largest sources of greenhouse gases, they are also a significant source of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulates, and mercury, all of which have direct public health and welfare consequences. EPA’s recently proposed Clean Power Plan, which applies Clean Air Act § 111(d) to reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs) from the nation’s fleet of fossil-fuel power plants, will have important implications for these ubiquitous co-pollutants.  Although the primary goal of the Clean Power Plan is to reduce GHGs, ancillary co-pollutant benefits are an important consideration in evaluating alternative mechanisms for controlling GHGs. 

The key to maximizing co-pollutant benefits will be shifting away from coal-fired power, the energy source that emits the highest levels of both GHGs and co-pollutants, and encouraging a more widespread shift from fossil fuels to no-carbon alternatives like consumer energy efficiency and renewable energy …

With little notice in the West, India has just launched the most far-reaching corporate social responsibility (CSR) program in the world.  The CSR law, which took effect April 1, requires large and mid-sized firms to contribute at least 2% of their pre-tax profits (averaged over the previous three years) to social, health, educational, or environmental causes.  It also requires companies to prepare a formal CSR policy and to report annually on their CSR activities.  The CSR law, section 135 of the Companies Act of 2013, was part of the first major overhaul of Indian corporate law in nearly sixty years. In February, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs issued regulations implementing the new law. 

The money involved is huge for India.  The CSR requirement is expected to raise $2 to $5 billion annually for the social sector.  A comparable 2% spending requirement in the United States would raise …

OIRA should conduct a cost-benefit analysis of its own activities and explore alternatives to its current oversight methods.

A White House office called OIRA polices regulations by other agencies in the executive branch.  OIRA basically performs the role of a traditional regulator – it issues regulations that bind other agencies, and agencies need OIRA approval before they can issue their own regulations.  Essentially, then OIRA regulates agencies like EPA the same way that those agencies regulate industry.  Issuing regulatory mandates and permits is a very traditional form of regulation, often called command and control.

There are a number of well-known criticisms of command-and-control regulation for being “one size fits all,” too rigid, unable to take advantage of information held by the regulated entities, and economically inefficient.  One might predict that OIRA’s own regulations would suffer from similar flaws.  To the extent that OIRA is trying to overcome …