The Case for a Higher Minimum Wage

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.nytimes.com

The political posturing over raising the minimum wage sometimes obscures the huge and growing number of low-wage workers it would affect. An estimated 27.8 million people would earn more money under the Democratic proposal to lift the hourly minimum from $7.25 today to $10.10 by 2016. And most of them do not fit the low-wage stereotype of a teenager with a summer job. Their average age is 35; most work full time; more than one-fourth are parents; and, on average, they earn half of their families’ total income. None of that, however, has softened the hearts of opponents, including congressional Republicans and low-wage employers, notably restaurant owners and executives. This is not a new debate. The minimum wage is a battlefield in a larger political fight between Democrats and Republicans — dating back to the New Deal legislation that instituted the first minimum wage in 1938 — over government’s role in the economy, over raw versus regulated capitalism, over corporate power versus public needs. Interactive Feature More than 4.8 million workers now earn the lowest legal pay. This calculator shows the hard choices that have to be made living on the smallest paychecks. But the results of the wage debate are clear. Decades of research, facts and evidence show that increasing the minimum wage is vital to the economic security of tens of millions of Americans, and would be good for the weak economy. As Congress begins its own debate, here...

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Months After Deadly Fire, Owners of Bangladesh Factory Surrender to Court

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.nytimes.com

DHAKA, Bangladesh — A husband and wife whose factory in Bangladesh was consumed by fire in 2012, a disaster that killed 112 employees, surrendered to a court on Sunday in Dhaka, the capital. In December, more than a year after the fire, the police filed charges of culpable homicide against the owners of the Tazreen factory — Delowar Hossain, and his wife, Mahmuda Akther, along with 11 associates, including the factory’s manager and an engineer. On the night of the fire, more than 1,150 people were in the eight-story building, working on a tight deadline to fill orders for international buyers. When the fire broke out and an alarm sounded, some managers told their employees to ignore the alarm and continue to work. As the fire spread, many workers found themselves trapped in smoke-filled staircases or behind windows that were covered with iron grilles. Mr. Hossain’s lawyer, A. T. M. Golam Gous, whose motion for bail was rejected on Sunday, argued that Mr. Hossain and Ms. Akther were not present at the time of the fire and had “neither direct involvement nor indirect involvement” in it. Mr. Gous said he would appeal the denial of bail. A state prosecutor, Anwarul Kabir, meanwhile, argued that the owners had failed to make the necessary arrangements to ensure the safety and security of the workers. Because the owners are “the...

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Payroll Data Shows a Lag in Wages, Not Just Hiring

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.nytimes.com

For the more than 10 million Americans who are out of work, finding a job is hard. For the 145 million or so who are employed, getting a raise is even harder. The government said on Friday that employers added 113,000 jobs in January, the second straight month of anemic growth, despite some signs of strength in the broader economy. The unemployment rate inched down in January to 6.6 percent, the lowest level since October 2008, from 6.7 percent in December. But the report also made plain what many Americans feel in their bones: Wages are stuck, and barely rose at all in 2013. They were up 1.9 percent last year, or a mere 0.4 percent after accounting for inflation. Not only was that increase even smaller than the one recorded in 2012, it was half the normal rate of wage gains in the two decades before the last recession. The stagnation helps explain why many people feel apprehensive even though the economy grew at a robust pace in the second half of 2013, corporate profits rose, the stock market boomed and the housing market continued to gain ground. The issue cuts across the American work force. In fact, white-collar workers did a bit worse than blue-collar workers last year in terms of wage growth. Austin Moore, 18, pictured at a career fair in Dallas, is one of many young job seekers. LM Otero/Associated Press “People are running in place in terms of their living standards,” said Ethan Harris, co-head of global economics at Bank of America Merrill...

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‘Aid in Dying’ Sentiment Gathers Momentum

Today's post was shared by The New Old Age and comes from newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com

Thanks to the marvels of medical science, our parents are living longer than ever before. Most will spend years dependent on others for the most basic needs. That burden falls to their baby boomer children. In The New Old Age, Paula Span and other contributors explore this unprecedented intergenerational challenge. You can reach the editors at newoldage@nytimes.com.

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No Judges, No Justice

The LHWCA covers claims for longshoremen and shipbuilding and repair workers.

Today's post comes from guest author Jay Causey, from Causey Law Firm.

Some months ago, I reported about a slowdown in the processing of claims under the Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act and allied statutes.  The LHWCA was enacted in 1927, and through amendments over the years has been broadened to include injury and disease claims for longshoremen and shipbuilding and repair workers. Expansion of the program in 1941 resulted in the Defense Base Act, covering employees of military contractors working abroad. With our ten-year presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, a large cohort of injured workers has fallen under the DBA in recent years.

Underfunding of ALJ positions within the Department of Labor routinely results in long delays for the hearing and decision making in claims, often meaning claimants are without any coverage for years.

In another segment of its Breathless and Burdened report (subsequent to the one I recently posted about, concerning how black lung victims are routinely having their claims denied as a result of coal company-sponsored evaluations at Johns Hopkins), the Center for Public integrity has now reported on the extreme reduction of the number of administrative law judges within the US Department of Labor who hear and decide claims under the LHWCA and DBA. The center reports that the number of ALJ’s, nationwide, it has fallen to 35, from 41 earlier in 2013 and 53 a decade ago. This has occurred in the context of a 68% rise of new cases before the office of administrative law judges, and 134% increase in pending cases.
Underfunding of ALJ positions within the Department of Labor routinely results in long delays for the hearing and decision making in claims, often meaning claimants are without any coverage for years. Longshore and military contractor employers and their insurance companies, knowing that the adjudicative process in contested claims has become ridiculously long, are emboldened to sit on monies that are clearly owed to injured workers.  In addition to the injustice to entitled injured workers resulting from this administrative chaos, to the extent that an injured workers medical benefits and indemnity payments are pushed to other systems, such as Medicare, Social Security, and state disability systems, the costs of the Longshore system are shifted to the federal tax payer and away from the employers and their carriers who should appropriately bear the burden.
Read about the specifics of particular cases in the Center’s report here.

Photo credit: Markus Brinkmann / Foter.com / CC BY-SA

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New study: Babies near gas wells more likely to have birth defects

Today's post was shared by FairWarning and comes from www.environmentalhealthnews.org

Info       Energy Tomorrow/flickr     Environmental Health News January 31, 2014 Women who live near natural gas wells in rural Colorado are more likely to have babies with neural tube and congenital heart defects, according to a new study. As natural gas extraction soars in the United States, the findings add to a growing concern by many activists and residents about the potential for health effects from the air pollutants. Researchers from the Colorado School of Public Health analyzed birth defects among nearly 125,000 births in Colorado towns with fewer than 50,000 people between 1996 and 2009, examining how close the mothers lived to natural gas wells. Babies born to mothers living in areas with the highest density of wells – more than 125 wells per mile – were more than twice as likely to have neural tube defects than those living with no wells within a 10-mile radius, according to the study published Tuesday. Children in those areas also had a 38 percent greater risk of congenital heart defects than those with no wells.  Both types of birth defects were fairly rare, occurring in a small percentage of births, but they can cause serious health effects. The researchers did not find a significant association between gas wells and other effects, including oral cleft defects, preterm births and low birth weight. Neural tube defects, such as spina bifida, are permanent deformities of the spinal cord or brain. They...

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Football helmet design can alter concussion rate, study finds

Helmet design may affect concussion rates, a study found

Today's post was shared by FairWarning and comes from www.latimes.com

Super Bowl viewers might want to keep an eye on the helmets crashing together in Sunday’s game between the Seattle Seahawks and Denver Broncos. A new study says that the lids worn by opposing quarterbacks Peyton Manning and Russell Wilson, not to mention the dreadlock-filled helmet of Seattle cornerback Richard Sherman, can reduce concussion risk by more than half, compared with an older model. The study adds to a growing consensus that helmet design can impact impacts. This one, published Friday in the Journal of Neurosurgery, was the first to control for the number of impacts different players receive. It measured head motion changes during more than 1.2 million impacts over five years of Division I NCAA football games played by eight college teams. Sixty-four of those hits resulted in diagnosed concussions, and the relative risk of being among those dizzy denizens of the gridiron was cut by roughly 54% if players wore a more advanced model helmet. Both helmets in the comparison were made by the same manufacturer, Riddell, which is the official helmet of the NFL (at least until Sunday’s game is over and its contract ends). “If players had matched impacts throughout their whole career, you’d see about half the number of concussions" in the newer helmet, said the study's lead author, Steven Rowson, a biomedical engineer at the Virginia Tech-Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences. The concussion rate for the more modern helmet worn by...

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