The bill — a the Senate counterpart to a House bill introduced in late October — was introduced by Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) and is being sponsored by her and Sen. Mike Johanns (R-Neb.), according to the Library of Congress. It was referred to the Senate’s Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, LOC also notes.
The bill, dubbed the TRUE Safety Act, would require the Government Accountability Office to perform an assessment of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s methodology in creating the rule, specifically the research that went into developing the 34-hour restart provisions of the rule. The July 1 hours-of-service changes could not go back into effect until six months after the GAO submitted its findings to Congress, unless the GAO study recommends otherwise. Click here to see the House version’s bill. The Senate version will be posted when it becomes available. |
Copyright
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
Bill to overturn hours-of-service rule introduced in Senate, referred to committee
Beating Back Pain
Two months ago, I stepped into a shower in a hotel room in Baton Rouge, La., and felt a slight twinge in my back. I didn’t pay it much mind. I’ve experienced twinges from time to time, but for more than 25 years, I have been essentially free of back pain. As you’ve probably guessed, that twinge didn’t go away. Instead, it got worse. It lodged in my lower back, and I could feel the sciatica all the way down to my knee. Within a week, I couldn’t walk more than 100 yards without severe pain. Among other things, I was embarrassed. In 1987, I wrote an article in New York magazine called “Ah, My Non-Aching Back,” about how I’d found relief through a doctor named John E. Sarno. By the time I saw Dr. Sarno, I had spent a year in relentless pain, visiting orthopedists and chiropractors, osteopaths and acupuncturists, trying yoga, physical therapy and bed rest, all to no avail. Dr. Sarno’s treatment was essentially a talking cure. His theory, stated simply, is that back pain develops as a way of unconsciously shifting attention away from uncomfortable feelings such as anger and anxiety. With rare exceptions, Dr. Sarno believes, back pain has no structural basis. Rather, it is almost always a consequence of muscle spasm that prompts pain, which leads to fear, and then more spasm, and eventually creates a vicious cycle of pain. He named the condition tension myositis syndrome. My prescription was to... |
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Self-Promotion Watch: Lead and Crime in Postwar America
I'm usually a little reticent about tooting my own horn, but since I've always had a lot of respect for James Surowiecki, I was sort of chuffed to see this in his year-end roundup of his favorite business stories:
Kevin Drum’s brilliant Mother Jones piece, “America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead,” explores the relationship between lead in the environment and crime (and a host of other social ills). It is not, I guess, a classic business story. But it’s a rigorous and enormously enlightening look at how businesses’ and regulators’ choices—in this case, the decision to keep lead in gasoline and paint—end up shaping society in ways that few expect. I’m not entirely sure that lead explains the entire drop in crime we’ve seen in cities across America. But Drum has certainly convinced me that getting lead out of the environment is one of the best, and most cost-effective, social interventions that regulators can make. |
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Is service work today worse than being a household servant?
Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from america.aljazeera.com
At least one class of American workers is having a much harder time today than a decade ago, than during the Great Depression and than a century ago: servants. The reason for this, surprisingly enough, is outsourcing. Let me explain. Prosperous American families have adopted the same approach to wages for servants as big successful companies, hiring freelance outside contractors for all sorts of functions — from child care and handyman chores to gardening and cleaning work — to reduce costs. Instead of live-in servants, who were common in prosperous U.S. households before World War II, better-off families now outsource the family cook, maid and nanny. It is part of a problem in developed countries around the globe that is gettingmoreattentionworldwide than in the U.S. We are falling backward in America, back to the Gilded Age conditions of a century and more ago when a few fortunate souls grew fabulously rich while a quarter of families had to take in boarders to make ends meet. Only back then, elites gave their servants a better deal. Thorstein Veblen, in his classic 1899 book, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” observed that “the need of vicarious leisure, or conspicuous consumption of service, is a dominant incentive to the keeping of servants.” Nowadays, servants are just as important to elites, except that they are conspicuous in their competition to avoid paying servants decent wages. In 1930, near the start of the Great Depression, 1 in... |
Bangladeshi Factory Owners Charged in Fire That Killed 112
NEW DELHI — The police in Bangladesh charged the owners of a garment factory and 11 of their employees with culpable homicide in the deaths of 112 workers in a fire last year that came to symbolize the appalling working conditions in the country’s dominant textile industry.
The case is the first time the authorities have sought to prosecute factory owners in Bangladesh’s garment industry, so powerful that the state has long sought to protect owners from unionization efforts by workers and from international scrutiny of working conditions.
The fire at the Tazreen Fashions factory on Nov. 24, 2012, was later eclipsed by a building collapse in April that cost the lives of 1,100 workers and brought global attention to the unsafe working conditions and low wages at many garment factories in Bangladesh, the No. 2 exporter of apparel after China. The fire also revealed the poor controls that top retailers had throughout their supply chain, since retailers like Walmart said they were unaware that their apparel was being made in such factories.
Among those charged on Sunday were the factory’s owners, Delowar Hossain and his wife, Mahmuda Akther, as well as M. Mahbubul Morshed, an engineer, and Abdur Razzaq, the factory manager, according to local news reports.
Bangladeshi officials have been under intense domestic and international pressure to file charges against those deemed responsible for last year’s deaths. Fires have been a persistent problem in...
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Monday, December 23, 2013
A History of Workers' Compensation - With a Washington State Slant
English Fire Insurance Laws Enacted in 1667 |
c2000, BC | Hammurabi, ruler of Babylon, was responsible for the Code of Hammurabi, part of which bears resemblance to today's workers' compensation laws. |
c460-c377, BC | Hippocrates, the father of contemporary medicine, established .a link between the respiratory problems of Greek stonecutters and the rock dust surrounding them. |
1667 | The Great Fire of London (September 2-7, 1666) caused the first English fire insurance laws to be enacted. |
1880 | William Gladstone pushes Employers’ Liability Act in Britain |
1864 | The Pennsylvania Mine Safety Act (PMSA) was passed into law. |
1871 | Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince of Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg, (known as Otto von Bismarck, a Prussian statesman) enacts the Employers’ Liability Act. |
1877 | The state of Massachusetts passed a law requiring guarding for dangerous machinery, and took authority for enforcement of factory inspection programs. |
1878 | The first recorded call by a labor organization for a federal occupational safety and health law is heard. |
1884 | Otto von Bismarck enacts Workers’ Accident Insurance |
1902 | The state of Maryland passed the first workers' compensation law. |
1911 | Industrial Insurance laws enacted in Washington State. |
1911 – 1915 | During this period, 30 states passed workers' compensation laws. |
1968 | President Lyndon Johnson called for a federal occupational safety and health law. |
1970 | President Richard Nixon signed into law the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), thus creating the OSH Administration and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). |
1972 | Self-Insurance for Workers' Compensation allowed for individual businesses in Washington State. |
2012 | Compromise and Release Structured Settlement Agreements allowed for certain Washington State workers’ compensation claims that meet basic criteria. |
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Buying Overseas Clothing, U.S. Flouts Its Own Advice
One of the world’s biggest clothing buyers, the United States government spends more than $1.5 billion a year at factories overseas, acquiring everything from the royal blue shirts worn by airport security workers to the olive button-downs required for forest rangers and the camouflage pants sold to troops on military bases.
But even though the Obama administration has called on Western buyers to use their purchasing power to push for improved industry working conditions after several workplace disasters over the last 14 months, the American government has done little to adjust its own shopping habits.
Labor Department officials say that federal agencies have a “zero tolerance” policy on using overseas plants that break local laws, but American government suppliers in countries including Bangladesh, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, Pakistan and Vietnam show a pattern of legal violations and harsh working conditions, according to audits and interviews at factories. Among them: padlocked fire exits, buildings at risk of collapse, falsified wage records and repeated hand punctures from sewing needles when workers were pushed to hurry up.
In Bangladesh, shirts with Marine Corps logos sold in military stores were made at DK Knitwear, where child laborers made up a third of the work force, according to a 2010 audit that led some vendors to cut ties with the plant. Managers punched workers for missed production quotas, and the plant had...
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