UPDATEThe most dangerous job in the country is now cell tower climber. These are the guys that climb up high on cell towers to install and maintain our nation’s mobile phone infrastructure.

Well, in the last two months, the profession has gotten even more deadly.

Since April 12, six men have fallen to their deaths working on cell towers in many different parts of the country.

Some experts believe it is the telecommunications industry’s rush to roll out a high-speed cellular phone technology called 3G that may be contributing to this out-of the-ordinary number of fatalities. Phone giant, AT&T has been scrambling to roll out the new system in hundreds of markets throughout the U.S. and has promised to have the system running by the end of this month.

But this upgrade in technology, which will mean all of us will benefit by faster mobile phone connections that will make it easier to surf the Internet from our phones, is coming at a horrendous cost.

On April 23, Mike F. Haynes, a cell tower employee with Overland Contracting Inc., fell 100 feet to his death from a tower near Natchez, Mississippi., and on May 16, Jonathan Guilford, 25, fell from a 200 foot tower while working on a At&T 3G project in Haubstadt, Indiana.

Clearly, such deaths are not unheard of in this industry, but this spate of falls “is unusual,” says Craig Lekutis, president of the online community for tower professionals Wireless Estimator.

The 3G roll-out schedule is ambitious, Lekutis says, and that could be contributing to the rise in deaths. Sometimes, foremen put extra pressure on workers to go faster, and unfortunately safety often suffers. The industry operates with such slim margins, every second counts when installing new systems, he adds.

In a Fortune online article on the deaths, AT&T officials denied that the 3G roll-out schedule had anything to do with the deaths:

A spokesman for AT&T Mobile confirms that Jonathan Guilford was working on a tower for an AT&T 3G network, but denies that his death or the others had anything to do with the June deadline. “That is a software upgrade,” says William Marks. “You go to each tower and use a laptop to perform the upgrade at the base station at the bottom of the tower. There is no need to climb towers.”

Marks acknowledges that AT&T is continuing to bring 3G networking to new markets in the U.S., work that involves building new towers and installing new antennas. But he says that this is part of the company’s broader 3G roll-out, and unrelated to any events in June.

On April 21, after the first two deaths on its projects, AT&T called for a construction stand down and issued an order to subcontractors that read, in part:

“AT&T … requires you to hold, at a minimum, a half-day safety refresher training course this week with all of your construction employees and subcontractors providing services for AT&T. Upon completion of the safety refresher training this week, AT&T expects that you will reinforce this training with additional random safety checks at the construction sites to ensure that appropriate safety measures are being used.”

AT&T’s Marks prefers to describe the order as a “refresher course,” rather than stand down. “We consider the safety of our contractors and our employees to be our first priority,” he says.

No matter who is to blame, workers need to get a reality check pronto!

I called the Occupational Health and Safety Administration last week to find out if the federal safety agency has launched an investigation into the deaths.

The spokeswoman at OHSA had her hands full on Friday when a crane fell in Manhattan and two workers were killed. She said she’d try to get back to me but I didn’t hold my breath. I am hoping to hear from her today because we need to get the word out there before more of these cell workers die.

These men, and a handful of women, that have the unbelievable courage to climb to such heights need to sit back and realize what really matters.

Cell workers are given the safety tools they need to keep safe. But too often when time constraints surface, “they just don’t practice 100 percent fall protection,” says Lekutis. They know one mistake could mean tragedy, but “in any profession people take short cuts.”

I know, we all get cocky on the job. The thinking is, “this can’t happen to me.”

But it can folks. Slow down!

UPDATE: Frankly, I’m disappointed with the response I’ve gotten from OSHA on this disturbing trend.

Here’s the reply from a spokeswoman there: “The Jackson area office is currently conducting in investigation into the death of an employee working on a cell tower in Natchez, MS. The Texas fatality is also currently under investigation by the San Antonio Area Office.”

As for putting out any safety and health bulletins to the industry so they can curtail any future deaths? Nope, nada. Nothing, even though industry observers have said this is an unusually high number of deaths.

The spokeswoman actually directed me to two old bulletins, one put out in 2004 and another from 1991. 1991?! Are they kidding?!

Here are the links just in case they may be useful. One here. The other here. I’m posting them because it doesn’t seem OSHA has the fire under them to get the word out on this pronto and maybe these will help somebody.

I have written a bit about the Crandall Canyon Mine collapse in Utah. You remember, the story was on the news for days and the mine’s owner Bob Murray took every chance he could to get on TV and talk about how safe the mine was and how he thought an earthquake actually caused the tragedy.

Well, he was wrong.

Yesterday, the Chairman of an investigation in Congress called for a criminal inquiry in to the collapse the death of nine miners.

This from the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) — A leading House Democrat wants federal prosecutors to open a criminal investigation into the deaths of nine people in a Utah mine collapse last year.

Democratic Rep. George Miller of California is the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. Miller says his investigation into the August 2007 deaths at Crandall Canyon led him to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department.

Miller says UtahAmerican Energy may have misled federal mine safety inspectors on how safe the mine was. He says investigation shows the company may have downplayed a “bump” that burst pillars in another section of the mine months before the accident.

The Labor Department is still investigating the Crandall Canyon collapse.

Miller feels the deaths were avoidable and he wants to know if there was a larger conspiracy here.

After reaching for the limelight during the vigil to try and get the miners out, Bob Murray suddenly went mute.

This from the Salt Lake City Tribune:

Adair, along with mine co-owner Bob Murray and three other officials with Murray Energy’s Utah subsidiaries, declined to be deposed by committee investigators, asserting their constitutional right against self-incrimination, the report said.

The president and a former principal of Agapito Associates Inc., the engineering firm that advised Murray Energy on the mine plan, also were subpoenaed to testify but invoked their Fifth Amendment right as well, according to the report.

So what now?

Again, the Tribune story:

The U.S. attorney for Utah said he will review a congressional request for a criminal investigation into whether the Crandall Canyon mine general manager “willfully misled” federal officials.

A spokeswoman for Brett Tolman, the state’s top federal law enforcement official, said he takes the request “very seriously” and will review the materials submitted by House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller.

“As with other referrals that come to our office, we will carefully screen the material provided to us, work with agents to conduct further investigation as needed, and consider whether criminal charges are appropriate based on evidence in the case,” Melodie Rydalch said in a statement.

While the mine operations should be held accountable if they indeed did put the safety of their workers knowingly in harms way, the bigger finger should be pointed at the federal agency responsible for overseeing these operations, the Mine Safety and Health Administration. The administration’s own inspector general has said the agency was negligent, according to the New York Times.

Hopefully the miners and their families will have justice in the end.

WEST TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (AP) — A leak has led to an explosion at a plant that turns coal into gas in western Indiana and authorities say two people have been killed.

Payonk says operations at the plant near a Duke Energy power station have been halted because of the explosion.

This happened Monday. It’s not an unusual story. Workers get killed too often in this country.

On Tuesday, Democratic lawmakers called for tougher punishments for companies that do not follow safety standards and people end up injured or dead.

It’s about freakin time!!

The maximum penalty for a safety violation is $70,000 and the most an individual or individuals can get in prison is six months. That’s all the lives of workers are worth?

The Associated Press reported yesterday that a bunch of senators were calling for more than a slap on the wrist for employers.

“If you improperly import an exotic bird, you can go to jail for two years. If you deal in counterfeit money, you’re looking at 20 years,” said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. “But if you gamble with the lives of your employees and one of them is killed, you risk only six months in jail.”

There were 5,840 fatal work injuries in the U.S. in 2006 — a fatality rate of 4.0 per 100,000 employed workers — the most recent numbers available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. OSHA said that the fatality rate was the lowest since the BLS instituted its Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries in 1992.

OSHA officials argue that this is all about politics:

“Election-year political theater cannot mask the truth that under this administration, workplace illness, injury and fatality rates are the lowest in OSHA’s history,” said Edwin G. Foulke Jr., assistant secretary of labor for OSHA.

What Foulke fails to mention is that labor advocates have said OSHA’s policing of the workplace has also diminished under the Bush Administration.

From the New York Times last year:

That response reflects OSHA’s practices under the Bush administration, which vowed to limit new rules and roll back what it considered cumbersome regulations that imposed unnecessary costs on businesses and consumers. Across Washington, political appointees — often former officials of the industries they now oversee — have eased regulations or weakened enforcement of rules on issues like driving hours for truckers, logging in forests and corporate mergers.

Since George W. Bush became president, OSHA has issued the fewest significant standards in its history, public health experts say. It has imposed only one major safety rule. The only significant health standard it issued was ordered by a federal court.

I’ve written often in this blog about worker safety. Here are links to some past posts.

The only way to get employers watching out for their workers is making penalties more severe when they break the rules. Corporations and the people that run them are more often driven by the bottom line. That’s just the way it is. If we want to make worker safety a priority we can not count on individuals always doing the right thing. I’m old enough now to realize there have the be checks and balances, and that means making companies write bigger checks when they throw safety out the window.

I remember going to Atlantic City casinos with my parents years ago. It wasn’t fun. I’m not much of a gambler, and I really hated being in a fog of smoke.

The more gamblers lost, it seemed, the more they would chain smoke. I couldn’t even imagine being a casino employee and having to breathe in that smoke day in and day out.

Well, many of the workers were sick of it as well, and they’ve been fighting for a long time to get a smoking ban. Yesterday, they won the battle.

The Atlantic City Council unanimously approved the ban after major opposition from casino owners, and the hair-man himself, Donald Trump.

From a Philadelphia Inquirer story:

The Casino Association of New Jersey, which represents the interests of the city’s 11 casinos, declined to comment on the council’s late-afternoon vote.

But at least one casino mogul, Donald J. Trump, whose name is emblazoned on three casinos here, said the full smoking ban would further cripple Atlantic City’s struggling casino industry against new neighboring competition.

“It’s too bad,” Trump said of the vote. “It will put Atlantic City at a competitively negative advantage, and it’s unfortunate.”

The ordinance now goes before Atlantic City Mayor Scott Evans to sign.

Evans has stated his “wholehearted support” for the measure, which restricts smoking to nongaming lounges - similar to ones found in many U.S. airports. He has 20 days to sign the bill, which would take effect Oct. 15.

Workers are obviously happy about the decision too. Also from the Inquirer:

Kim Hesse, a dealer at Caesars, gave up smoking in 1988 and decided to lead a healthier life. But, she said, her job got in the way.

“Every time I went to work, it defeated my efforts,” said Hesse, who started dealing at age 18, straight out of high school. “As soon as you walk into the casinos, [the smoke] would hit you like a wall.

“You feel like a human filter - that the casinos have no other filtration except us,” she said.

Like many of her dealer brethren, Hesse became active in the fight for a full smoking ban about two years ago and joined forces with local health organizations, including the American Cancer Society.

Their cause was aided by the United Auto Workers, which stepped in on their behalf in December. The UAW has been trying to unionize all Atlantic City dealers for the last year.

It’s great news for workers no matter what Trump thinks because at least now they will live a bit longer.

I have to disclose something here. My father smoked most of his life until he finally gave into his three little daughters who kept begging him to quit.

After nearly 20 years of not smoking, my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer anyway. He had done the damage after a lifetime of smoking. It was too late for him. Well, maybe we were lucky enough to have a few extra, precious years with him because he did quit.

Anyway, smoking devastated our family because we lost the greatest man in the world.

I think Atlantic City gamblers will still make the trek to the casino mecca. Unfortunately, Trump can find solace in a bad economy that typically gets desperate people looking for Lady Luck to shine down on them.

I get tons of emails about companies going green, green jobs, green ways to commute, etc.

I usually just hit the delete button, but not last week when an email showed up in my mailbox about a union that was going green.

My first thought was: “why the heck is a union using it’s valuable time worrying about the environment when workers’ paychecks are declining and most working stiffs are worried about losing their jobs in this economy?”

The email was from the Service Employees International Union and it details a host of things its leadership wants to do in order to help the world become a green place.

If I had gotten the email from any other union — say the United Auto Workers, which has seen its membership decimated and its members put through the ringer — I would have gone ballistic in this blog, mocking any initiative that doesn’t help its members shore up their livelihoods.

But the SEIU, with its 1.9 million members, has actually been one of the few unions in this country that is growing.

Do they have the luxury to focus on “green” and not just wage and hour issues? I’m not sure. But I’ll give them a bit of leeway here.

Basically, they want a bit of “green” language in their local contracts for members. And some of what they propose will also help workers themselves, well, more directly than helping cut down on overall pollution for the earth.

Here is some of what the SEIU proposes:

Public transportation benefits to decrease automobile use.

Replacement of toxic cleaning supplies to protect workers, land and water.

Encouragement of daytime cleaning to reduce nighttime energy use in buildings.

Establishment of labor-management environmental committees for ongoing monitoring of environmental issues in the workplace.

All these sound reasonable, but the SEIU leadership has to convince management and their own members, that pushing these issues during contract negotiations is critical. Typically, such negotiations are contentious enough as both sides battle over money and benefits. So, adding “green” demands will probably stir up the pot even more.

“We need to do a whole education thing with our members about this,” says Gerry Hudson, SEIU’s executive vice president. “We need to do something about climate change. We can use our bargaining power to be helpful.”

The green initiative will kick off with a resolution at the SEIU’s convention in June, and Hudson is hopeful the proposal will get some momentum coming out of the convention that will lead to pilot projects after the November election.

That’s when he believes dialogue involving climate change throughout the country will “heat up.”

A hearing before Congress regarding whether federal regulators are in bed with U.S. airline companies took place today.

At the center of this hearing, that is still going on as I write this blog, are two employees for the Federal Aviation Adminstration (FAA). These two employees, Charalambe Boutris and Douglas Peters, now have the dreaded and admirable distinction of being whistleblowers.

They blew the whistle on the government, on Southwest airlines. They let everyone know that when they wanted to report maintenance problems with Southwest’s planes they were thwarted and their jobs were threatened.

This is a hard thing to do. You need your paycheck to survive, to help your family survive, so the last thing you want to do is put that paycheck in jeopardy.

But some people, for some reason do.

Why?

Because they have to. Because they can’t sleep at night. Because not coming forward sooner or later could me horrific tragedy…death, injury… Because they should.

Congress is asking questions now. Wondering why the FAA dropped the ball, and whether this government agency is just too cozy with industry.

No matter what conclusion they come to the lives of these two whistleblowers if forever changed. They will suffer. But they will also be able to hold their heads up high.

That’s worth a lot. But alas, it won’t pay the bills.

This weekend was International Women’s Day, a holiday that’s been celebrating the achievements of women since the early 1900s.

From the International Women’s Day site:

Following the decision agreed at Copenhagen in 1911, International Women’s Day (IWD) was honoured the first time in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland on 19 March. More than one million women and men attended IWD rallies campaigning for women’s rights to work, vote, be trained, to hold public office and end discrimination.

About a week after the rallies, an event took place that shined a spotlight on the importance of such a day.

Have any of you heard about the Triangle Waist Factory fire in New York City? It was a tragic event where 146 mostly young, immigrant women died in a horrific fire at the blouse factory, many jumping to their deaths from the 9th floor of the building. There was gross negligence on the part of the company owners, including the locking of doors during work shifts and the lack of functioning fire hoses.

Near closing time on Saturday afternoon, March 25, 1911, a fire broke out on the top floors of the Asch Building in the Triangle Waist Company. Within minutes, the quiet spring afternoon erupted into madness, a terrifying moment in time, disrupting forever the lives of young workers. By the time the fire was over, 146 of the 500 employees had died. The survivors were left to live and relive those agonizing moments. The victims and their families, the people passing by who witnessed the desperate leaps from ninth floor windows, and the City of New York would never be the same.

The owners were found not to be liable for the tragedy but this one event was a turning point for the rights of working women.

Working conditions for women and men have improved since the early 1990s, but unfortunately, women still have a long way to go when it comes to equal pay and equal opportunities to advance in their careers.

A day to reflect on how far we still have to go is a good thing…if anyone really notices.

In this blog, you’ve heard me rail against corporations that disregard workers, and the consumers of their products. And you’ve read my posts pointing the finger at government agencies who are supposed to protect worker safety and uphold the rights of workers but drop the ball.

Well, today I want to point the finger at workers.

A lot of people across the country are outraged at the recent meat recall at a major meat packing company in California that supplied ground beef to schools around the country. There are actual videos of workers prodding and poking sick cattle to get up as the animals headed for slaughter.

This is a bad thing because the government strictly prohibits to consumption of sickly cows because they may carry Mad Cow disease.

Despite this fact, workers supposedly were encouraged by managers to brush aside this fact and get the bovines dancing.

From the Wall Street Journal today:

The video showed workers at the company’s plant here forcing sick or injured cows into slaughter by kicking them or ramming them with forklifts.

Thanks to those workers and managers, the meat from those cows ended up heading right for the bellies of little kids. And the workers must have known this. Did they themselves feel okay eating this meat?

I know, the U.S. Department of Agriculture must take some blame here, especially since this particular meat, because it’s heading for school kids, required even more inspections by the goverment agency.

And I know, the company, Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co., must take some blame here as well. The top dogs know what’s going on in their own facilities. I have seen first hand how plant supervisors keep on top of every bathroom break their workers take. I can’t imagine they missed something like this.

But folks, I want to lay a lot of the blame at the feet of workers today. If the workers at the facility refused to engage in this illegal behavior this would not have happened. If workers reported the problem to government inspectors, who had come to the plant often, this wouldn’t have happened.

I know, if an employee stands up they risk their job. I understand that. Employers retaliate in this way against their workers often. But when is enough enough?

I address this issue in my column today on MSNBC.com.

I am in no way diminishing the importance of holding the USDA or Hallmark/Westland accountable.

But it’s about time that we realize we also contribute to the ills of the workplace, ills that unfortunately end up pouring out into our society at large.

We’re all responsible for the bad beef out there, no?

UPDATE BELOW –

Is our government turning a blind eye to worker injuries, and even death?

I know you’ve all heard a bit about the deadly sugar plant explosion in Georgia. Maybe you caught a bit of the story on the nightly news. Yet another accident kills workers. We let these stories just disappear into the next day’s news. Remember the mine workers in Utah? Probably not.

I don’t blame you. We get bombarded with news everyday. We all hope someone investigates these tragedies. We all hope someone, or some agency, or some corporations is held accountable. The sugar refinery tragedy was heart wrenching.

From the Associated Press:

SAVANNAH, Ga.—A vase of red roses sat in front of the church altar Saturday, flanked by portraits of Truitt Byers and a blue baseball cap with the logo for Dixie Crystals—the brand of sugar produced by a refinery where the 54-year-old was killed in an explosion.

The first memorial services for Byers and the other victims came a day after crews recovered the final body from inside the Imperial Sugar refinery in Port Wentworth west of Savannah. The explosion killed nine people Feb. 7—eight found dead inside the plant, and a ninth worker who died of burns at an Augusta hospital.

The major question is: Could these accidents have been prevented? In this case, the answer might be yes.

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