Given the sustained high temperatures across the country, employees who work outside, or in factories that are not air conditioned or difficult to keep cool, have had a hard time trying to do their jobs. They’ve faced heat exhaustion, serious illness and even death.

I recently wrote about the most dangerous jobs in the heat — including roofers, baggage handlers, foundry workers, road crews, and farm workers — and the government talked a lot about all they were doing to protect workers. But it turns out, they have pretty thin authority to keep employers from putting employees in harms way when it comes to the heat; and the justice system doesn’t always work after the fact.

One particularly disturbing story involved a pregnant teenager who was a farmworker, and her bosses got a way with a slap on the wrist.

From the Associated Press:

Two California farm supervisors charged in the heat-related death of a pregnant teen farmworker reached a plea deal Wednesday and were sentenced to community service and probation, angering farmworker advocates who had called for jail time.

Authorities said Maria Isavel Vasquez Jimenez, 17, died in 2008 because supervisors denied her shade and water as she pruned grapes for nine hours in nearly triple-digit heat in a San Joaquin County vineyard.

(more…)

Fire raging in a clothing factory. Doors locked. Burning bodies flying out of windows. Scores of workers dead.

No, I’m not talking about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire 100 years ago today that killed 146 garment workers; I’m talking about a factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where nearly 30 workers lost their lives last year in an eerily similar tragedy.

This was just one example of the deplorable conditions workers around the world still endure to produce products for us. The workers at this particular facility made clothing for JCPenney and Gap.

According to the BBC, Bangladesh alone has 4,000 factories that supply billions of dollars worth of goods to the United States and Europe.

And here’s a run down of how those workers are treated at the Hameem factory where the fire broke out from Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights:

The workers toil 12 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week, with just a single day off a month. The highest wage at Hameem is 28 cents an hour - less than one-tenth of what the Triangle workers earned 100 years ago! (Adjusted for inflation, the 14 cents an hour they earned in 1911 is worth $3.18 an hour today.)

“We’re deeply saddened by the tragic fire in the Hameem factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh,” Gap Inc. said in a statement after the tragedy.

Should we as consumers also be deeply saddened that we keep feeding this machine?

Actors have been dropping like flies on the set of the new Broadway musical “Spider-Man” and finally safety regulators and politicians are peeling off their cobwebs of inertia to actually do something to protect workers.

According to an article in Workforce Management magazine last week, regulators in New York want to clamp down on what has become increasingly technical and complex and risky live theatrical performances. Spider Man, the story said, has 38 aerial maneuvers that involve actors being hoisted into harnesses and flying through the air.

“The current legislation that governs these kinds of performances dates back to 1953 and has not been materially updated since then,” New York assemblyman Rory Lancman told the magazine. “Spider-Man is not going to be the last Broadway performance that pushes the envelope in terms of the stunts and special effects it uses.”

I am glad regulators are stepping in here but it made me wonder why it took so long. The headlines on the show, dating back to fall rehearsals, have been full of accidents and near-death experiences for the actors. Accidents were actually caught on video and made the rounds on YouTube:

Unfortunately, there’s sometimes a lack of motivation to get ahead of serious workplace risks, and as a result 2010 was a bad year for worker safety. (more…)

I’ve been monitoring the Black Friday deals for a few weeks now as part of a new “Deal of the Day” section I’m writing for MSNBC.com and TodayShow.com, and I fear I may be contributing to what is expected to be holiday shopping hysteria later this week.

Already the airwaves, newspapers, and the Internet are bursting with endless, “never-before-seen” bargains. And whether these bargains turn out to be real or not, consumers can’t help but be caught up in the pre-Black Friday marketing push. I’ve talked to many deal-hunting hotshots in the past week, and they’re getting their game faces and cleats on for the big day.

In 2008, I wrote about a 34-year old Wal-Mart temp worker at a Long Island store named Jdimytai Damour who had hardly any training in dealing with crowds and was crushed to death by shoppers when the doors opened on Black Friday. His father Ogera Charles told me a year after his death that “there were too many people.” Of Walmart and the shoppers, he said, “they both could have done a better job.”

Turns out, retailers and consumers apparently aren’t doing a better job, because worker injuries during special sales events have actually increased in recent years.

Many workers are hopeful things won’t be as crazy, but they’re preparing for the worst. A worker at Sears told me yesterday she’s been asked to come into work at 3:45 am this Friday; and when I asked her how she felt about working she had a bit of fear in her eyes. “It will be okay,” she said, unconvincingly.

That’s why I decided to do a blog post to warn workers of the danger ahead. I’m not being an alarmist folks. Even the government is worried about worker safety amidst the buying bonanza expected this Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, and is warning retailers that if they don’t take precautionary measure to protect workers they are going to be in big trouble. (more…)

Now that the euphoria over the rescue of 33 Chilean miners is subsiding a bit, it’s a good time to look at whether things ever change or stay the same after such tragedies.

NPR did a great piece yesterday on the miners highlighting the safety risks that still exist among that nation’s poorly regulated mining industry:

Mining made Chile and 170,000 work its mines. It’s tough, dirty, dangerous work. And until recently, those miners were invisible.

But are they truly visible now, and will their plight lead to real change? Sadly, I’m not optimistic.

Does anyone remember the 29 miners who died at the Massey mine in West Virgina last spring? Those men weren’t as lucky, and it turns out it meant little to the management of the mine. (more…)

Before you buy a product from a company, or send your resume to an employer, wouldn’t it be great if you could find out which companies in your town outsourced the most jobs to China, or consistently thwarted the nation’s labor laws?

Well, one organization has put together an online service to try and do just that.

Yesterday, the AFL-CIO, a large federation of unions, introduced a service called JobTracker that offers people a window into information that was next to impossible to get before, especially in one place —

Companies that
*outsourced jobs.
*had mass layoffs.
*violated health and safety laws.
*engaged in union busting.
*or discriminated against workers.

Maybe we should start calling the federation the AFL-SeeIKnow.

“This resource gives working people new ammunition,” said Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO. (more…)

Someone should make an app for my iPhone that allows you to search a data base of employers who have come under fire by the government for employee mistreatment. If there were, fewer people would probably get sick from tainted food.

One of the biggest food recalls in history is going on right now. And guess what? The company responsible has a history of treating it’s workers badly.

Wright County Egg, an Iowa company, has had to recall more than 300 million eggs nationwide because of salmonella. The owner of the firm, Jack DeCoster, was called the “poster child” of worker mistreatment in a 2006 article in Boston magazine titled: “The Invisible Harvest Exploitation. Coercion. Poverty wages. New England has its own Grapes of Wrath, and it’s happening now. Inside the hidden world of the migrant farm workers who put food on your table.”

If any of you knew this, would you have eaten his eggs? (more…)

Showing a disregard for the safety of workers can get you in trouble in this country. But unfortunately, not enough trouble.

BP executives and managers have been screwing up for years when it comes to worker safety, and the recent deaths of 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon is only a continuation of a sad history for the company. In 2005, 15 people died and hundreds where injured at a BP refinery blast in Texas.

If a company’s executives or managers are so focused on the bottom line that employees end up maimed or dead because they cut safety corners, the government can come in and fine them.

But the fines for worker deaths are pathetic. Turns out they are more severe if you kill a turtle. (more…)