This week, the federal government said it found major safety violations at a key Hershey plant in Pennsylvania.

But guess what? Hershey isn’t in trouble.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited two Hershey contractors — Exel Inc. and SHS Staffing Solutions — for the violations. The charges are serious including everything from willful thwarting of U.S. safety laws to the failure to keep tabs on worker injuries, and the fine was high, nearly $290,000.

Even though the workers at the plant make Hershey products and the company profits from those Kisses and Kit-Kats, the company pretty much gets to wash its hands of the whole thing.

A reporter for the New York Times, Julia Preston, rightly called Hershey after news of the fine came out, and the company took a pass:

A spokesman for the Hershey Company, Jeff Beckman, noted that Hershey had not been cited by OSHA, and he said he could not speak for Exel.

But what about Hershey’s role in this? I asked Labor Department spokeswoman Joanna Hawkins why Hershey wasn’t cited, and she said, (more…)

Yesterday I wrote about Apple’s announcement that it enlisted a labor group to probe harsh conditions at the company’s manufacturing operations in China.

It’s unclear if this is a real attempt to deal with mass suicides and child labor violations, among other horrors at the facilities, or just a PR stunt. But what we do know is the company felt compelled to do something.

Why? It turns out, the iPhone and iPad devotees out there aren’t all drinking the Apple Kool-Aid.

I know Apple products are great. I’m typing this post on a MacBook Pro right now. But how will Corporate America ever clean up its act if we, the consumers, don’t take a stand against unethical things companies do? I have written in the past about how so many of us, especially Apple fanatics, don’t even care about labor violations. I’m glad to say today that I’m eating my words. An Apple zealot should get a lot of credit for forcing the company’s hand. (more…)

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…)

On May 6, a group of worker advocates in Hong Kong released a report on factories in China where Apple’s iPhones and iPods, and Hewlett Packard’s laptops are made, and the findings were pretty damning. Alas, if anyone noticed the report, three workers may be alive today.

The owner of the facilities Foxconn had come under fire last year for the 14-plus suicides committed by employees of the company. The problem of workers flinging themselves off of stairwells at the plant because of the horrible working conditions was so bad the company installed nets to keep employees from jumping off upper levels.

Foxconn had promised to make things better but a group called Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior in Hong Kong decided to keep an eye on whether things would really change, hence the report. In additional to finding a continuation of tough working conditions, including forced overtime and crummy wages, the researchers discovered an ominous problem. (more…)

Feb. 4, 2009: An Eyewitness News investigation reveals that air traffic control towers in New York and New Jersey may be dangerously understaffed.

March 21, 2007: Air-traffic control towers at small and medium airports have been routinely understaffed with only one person on a shift, a violation of federal aviation rules, a government investigator said Tuesday.

Sept. 23, 2006: The recent tragic event crash of a commuter jet in Kentucky shined an uncomfortable spotlight on the U.S. air traffic control system… Controllers in Houston and across the country are now facing unprecedented staffing and scheduling pressures. We have a depleted work force watching record air traffic at grueling intervals in our city, and one terrible incident was all it took for us to look each other in the eyes and say, “We need answers about staffing and scheduling before safety suffers in Houston.”

If you’re scratching your head over all the latest reports about air traffic controllers nodding off at work, you shouldn’t be. All you have to do is read the endless stories like the ones above that are easy to find. Understaffing and long hours have plagued the industry for a while now and have only gotten worse during the Great Recession.

Many control towers across the country have been hurting for workers, and guess what the Federal Aviation Administration finally did yesterday, other than kick out the FAA chief? The agency finally announced it will be adding staff to 27 towers nationally. Helloooooooo. What took so long?

The understaffing at government agencies and throughout Corporate America has led to a lot of overworked, yet still, productive U.S. workers, and they’re tired. And air traffic controllers aren’t the only one snoozing. (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…)