New Oxfam Report: Poultry Industry Denies Worker Requests for Bathroom Breaks
Can you imagine working for a boss who refuses you the dignity of taking a bathroom break? According to a revealing new report published today by Oxfam America, denial of bathroom breaks is a very real practice at poultry plants across the country, and line workers at these plants often "wait inordinately long times (an hour or more), then race to accomplish the task within a certain timeframe (e.g., ten minutes) or risk discipline."
If you've never worked on an assembly or production line, you may wonder why workers need approval to use the bathroom in the first place. The processing line at a poultry plant moves rapidly, which means when one worker leaves the line, another must take his or her place to keep up with production. Typically, the employer will have a system in place for workers to signal when they need a break, and then a "relief worker" or "floater" will fill in.
But according to Oxfam's report, No Relief: Denial of Bathroom Breaks in the Poultry Industry, poultry plants don't always employ enough relief workers for the system to function properly, resulting in workers being denied breaks to prevent disruptions on the …
Today, a lot of numbers will be thrown around – the staggering number of workers who died gruesome deaths on the job last year, the paltry fines that employers responsible for those deaths paid, the months and years we've waited for Congress to revisit the Occupational Safety and Health Act to make it more relevant to our modern workforce.
There's good reason to reflect on those numbers. They tell us something important about our society and our relationship to work. They tell us that we have a long way to go before the real value of workers' time, effort, and dedication to their jobs is respected and honored.
40,000 Verizon workers are on strike. The contract dispute is complicated, but one of the core issues is the company's threat to move jobs from one location to another, like so many interchangeable, faceless component parts …
On April 6, U.S. District Court Judge Irene Berger sentenced former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship to one year in jail and a $250,000 fine for conspiring to violate federal health and safety standards at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia. The mine exploded and killed 29 miners in April 2010.
In an April 7 New York Times op-ed, CPR Member Scholar Rena Steinzor, Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, explained the significance of Blankenship's conviction and sentence and what it portends for other top managers and CEOs:
"The first C.E.O. ever to be convicted of conspiring to violate industrial safety standards will soon take his place in prison.
"The sentence is noteworthy, however, not because of the law, but in spite of it. The Mine Safety and Health Act, the statute …
Today, U.S. District Court Judge Irene Berger sentenced former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship for conspiring to violate federal health and safety standards at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia. Upper Big Branch exploded and killed 29 miners in April 2010. CPR Member Scholar Rena Steinzor, Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, issued the following statement:
"Although Mr. Blankenship won't spend much time in jail, an outcome determined by a disgracefully weak law rather than the case against him, at least he will go down in the record books as the first CEO convicted and imprisoned for causing the death of his workers because he disdained the law. This case should send a shiver down the spine of every top manager who follows the approach described by one witness: 'Run, run, run until we get …
Decades in the making, OSHA’s new silica rule will better protect millions of workers from a highly toxic, cancer-causing substance that has killed thousands while the rule slowly worked its way through the regulatory gauntlet, administration after administration. Today, in quarries, foundries, building sites, and kitchen rehab jobs across the country, workers can look forward to breathing cleaner air.
But today’s announcement is far from the end of the story. Next comes the inevitable litigation. Following their tired playbook, special interest groups will beg a court to put a hold on the rule, hoping to delay or undo it. Workers have waited long enough for this rule. It is high time industry made an investment in the future by establishing the protections this rule requires. Investing now in tools and policies to better protect workers will save hundreds of lives every year. That’s not …
NEWS RELEASE: New Manual Helps Workplace-Safety Activists Push for Criminal Charges in On-the-Job Tragedies
Washington, DC ----- Every year, thousands of workers across the United States are killed on the job — 4,679 in 2014 alone. Thousands more are seriously injured. Many of these deaths and injuries are entirely preventable when employers put in place basic safety measures. Some even result from company policies and practices that encourage and reward behavior that creates unacceptably risky conditions.
Ignoring workplace safety requirements is against the law, but a new manual from the Center for Progressive Reform notes that employers rarely face criminal penalties for endangering workers’ health and safety. Instead, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and state labor agencies typically impose only small civil fines for regulatory violations. CPR’s manual, Preventing Death and Injury on the Job: The Criminal Justice Alternative in State Law, urges action at the …
Partisan efforts in Congress to roll back health and safety rules are common fodder on this blog. But last week, we saw a new twist, with a high-level Obama Administration official giving cover to a right-wing attempt to weaken protections for hundreds of thousands of workers in the poultry industry.
The workers in question are at the center of the highly industrialized process of turning live chickens into shrink-wrapped skinless parts. That puts them at a critical juncture in the vertically integrated industry, where major conglomerates like Perdue, Tyson, and JBS control the entire production chain from fertilized egg to boneless breast. More than 200,000 farms, producing 8.5 billion birds a year, all feed into about 300 federally inspected slaughter facilities. These facilities are a potential choke point in poultry companies’ distribution networks, which profit on speed and efficiency. And right at the front end …
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has informally announced that it is unlikely to finalize its long-awaited rule to limit workers' exposure to respirable crystalline silica by the month's end, as the agency had expected. OSHA's deputy assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health, Jordan Barab, told Politico on Friday, Feb. 18, that he "can pretty much guarantee" the rule will be delayed, but he expects "it will be out soon."
The silica rule, which OSHA proposed in Sept. 2013 after 20 years of development, cannot come soon enough for workers and their families. Exposure to these tiny dust particles can cause an incurable and fatal lung disease called "silicosis," and other debilitating health effects. But will the final rule demand that employers' take genuine responsibility for workers' health by implementing effective controls to reduce hazardous silica exposures? Or will OSHA have …
As the year draws to a close and the New Year approaches, people all around the world will be contemplating what they can resolve to do better in 2016. This year, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) seem to be celebrating the tradition as well. In a move akin to a “New Year’s Resolution” to do better by workers, the two agencies have just announced that they will be expanding their “worker endangerment initiative” to bolster criminal prosecutions against employers responsible for endangering workers’ health and safety.
The new initiative is an encouraging step toward punishing employers who make decisions that put profits over people and toward deterring others from violating federal labor laws. But the initiative—while it’s a beneficial supplement to the weak criminal penalties applicable to many labor violations—is also limited in scope …
This afternoon, the U.S. Department of Labor announced that it was sending its final version of a long-awaited rule on silica dust in the workplace to the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for final review. CPR Executive Director Matthew Shudtz responded to the news with the following statement:
Workers across the United States have been waiting for this day for a long time. But don’t overlook the fact that this announcement simply marks a procedural accomplishment in a decades-long administrative process. This rule has been to OIRA before, and the last time it sat with the White House bean counters for two and a half years. By Executive Order, this review should be complete in a matter of weeks. That’s what millions of silica-exposed workers expect and what the White House needs to deliver.
We won't know the full …
