In Latest Metro-North Accident, Worker Is Fatally Struck by Train in East Harlem

Transportation safety continues to be a major issue. Today's post is shared from nytimes.org

A Metro-North Railroad worker was struck and killed by a train in East Harlem early Monday morning, officials said, the latest in a string of devastating accidents for the railroad over the past year.

At 12:54 a.m., the man, identified as James Romansoff, 58, of Yonkers, was struck while working on the tracks at East 106th Street and Park Avenue, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The train, from Metro-North’s Hudson line, had left Grand Central Terminal at 12:47 a.m., bound for Poughkeepsie, with 36 passengers on board.

The National Transportation Safety Board said on Monday morning that it was starting an investigation into the accident and was sending three investigators to New York. The transportation authority said that its Police Department was also investigating.

The authority said that Mr. Romansoff, who had been with Metro-North for eight years, was part of a crew restoring power to tracks that were closed over the weekend for maintenance work. Mr. Romansoff and the crew were initially working on a stretch of track that had been taken out of service, according to a source briefed on the situation by federal authorities, but for reasons that remain unclear, Mr. Romansoff crossed into a section of active track.

James Romansoff, 58, of Yonkers, was killed Monday while...

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Night Shift Work Causally Linked to an Increase in Breast Cancer

Working at night increases the risk of breast cancer according to a recent study.

Objectives The potential mechanisms that link night-shift work with breast cancer have been extensively discussed. Exposure to light at night (LAN) depletes melatonin that has oncostatic and anti-estrogenic properties and may lead to a modified expression of estrogen receptor (ER) α. Here, we explored the association between shift work and breast cancer in subgroups of patients with ER-positive and -negative tumors.
Methods GENICA (Gene–ENvironment Interaction and breast CAncer) is a population-based case–control study on breast cancer with detailed information on shift work from 857 breast cancer cases and 892 controls. ER status was assessed by immunohistochemical staining. Associations between night-shift work and ER-positive and -negative breast cancer were analyzed with conditional logistic regression models, adjusted for potential confounders.
Results ER status was assessed for 827 cases and was positive in 653 and negative in 174 breast tumors. Overall, 49 cases and 54 controls were “ever employed” in shift work including night shifts for ≥1 year. In total, “ever shift work” and “ever night work” were not associated with an elevated risk of ER-positive or -negative breast tumors. Night work for ≥20 years was associated with a significantly elevated risk of ER-negative breast cancer [odds ratio (OR) 4.73, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1.22–18.36].
Conclusions Our case–control study suggests that long-term night-shift work is associated with an increased risk of ER-negative breast cancers. Further studies on histological subtypes and the analysis of other potentially relevant factors are crucial for discovering putative mechanisms

The report:  Rabstein S, Harth V, Pesch B, Pallapies D, Lotz A, Justenhoven C, Baisch C,Schiffermann M, Haas S, Fischer H-P, Heinze E, Pierl C, Brauch H, Hamann U, Ko Y,Brüning T, "Night work and breast cancer estrogen receptor status – results from the German GENICA study", Scand J Work Environ Health 2013;39(5):448-455 doi:10.5271/sjweh.3360,  2010;36(2):163-179 2010;36(2):134-141

Read more ablout "breast cancer" and workers' compensation:

Workers' Compensation: Breast Cancer Risk Doubles With ...

Jul 02, 2013

Objectives Long-term night work has been suggested as a risk factor for breast cancer; however, additional studies with more comprehensive methods of exposure assessment to capture the diversity of shift patterns are ...

http://workers-compensation.blogspot.com/

Breast Cancer Linked to Workers' Exposure at Semiconductor Factory

Dec 15, 2012

A semiconductor plant worker, who had been exposed to solvents and radiation while working 5 years at a semiconductor factory in South Korea has been held to have suffered an compensable disease related to her ...

http://workers-compensation.blogspot.com/

Workers' Compensation: Breast Cancer Presumed Occupational ...

Mar 18, 2011

Fire fighters in Canada are supporting legislation that would establish a legal presumption that breast cancer is an occupationally related illness. The legislation also creates a presumption that 3 other cancers (skin, prostate ...

http://workers-compensation.blogspot.com/

Breast Cancer and the Environment: A Life Course Approach

Dec 05, 2012

Breast Cancer and the Environment: A Life Course Approach - Institute of Medicine: "With more than 230,000 new cases of breast cancer expected to be diagnosed in the United States in 2011, many wonder about the role ...

http://workers-compensation.blogspot.com/

Workplace Accidents and Daylight Savings Time

While everyone may be waking up a little tired for work as the clock was moved forward last night by a hour to observe Daylight Savings Time (DST), the impact on work related accidents may be minor. 

A recent study in Finland concludes: "It seems that sleep deprivation after DST transition is not harmful enough to impact on occupational accident rates."

On the other hand  others report, "The real issue, however is not the later hours or extra sunlight. Studies have shown that changing the clocks is responsible for health problems (including increased heart attack and vehicular accident risks) and leads to hundreds of thousands of hours of lost productivity in workplaces across the country. Also: It's really annoying."

See also: A Whitehouse Petition to "Eliminate the bi-annual time change caused by Daylight Savings Time

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Do Corporations Have a Right to Profit From Endangering Our Health?

In his farewell address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned Americans about the growing power of the military-industrial complex. More than 50 years later, Nicholas Freudenberg, Distinguished Professor of Public Health at City University of New York, has issued a warning no less grave about “the corporate consumption complex” – the interconnected web of corporations, financial institutions and marketers that, in the name of individual rights, promote and profit from our unhealthy habits.

In Lethal but Legal: Corporations, Consumption, and Protecting Public Health, Freudenberg argues that “In a global economy that focuses relentlessly on profit, enhancing the bottom line of a few hundred corporations . . . has become more important than realizing the potential for good health.” According to Mark Bittman of The New York Times, “Freudenberg details how six industries — food and beverage, tobacco, alcohol, firearms, pharmaceutical and automotive — use pretty much the same playbook to defend the sales of health-threatening products. This playbook, largely developed by the tobacco industry, disregards human health and poses greater threats to our existence than any communicable disease you can name.”

To turn this destructive calculus around, Freudenberg told Bittman, “What we need is to return to the public sector the right to set health policy and to limit corporations’ freedom to...

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What really caused the decline of American unions?

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

Evan Soltas, a Princeton student writing fluently from a platform at Bloomberg View, should be praised for touching off a vigorous debate among print journalists, bloggers and other commentators (including me) over the role of unions in the U.S. economy. As for the points he's raised and on which he's now doubling down in reaction to criticism he's received, they're still wrong. It's proper to remember that what really set off this discussion was the United Auto Workers' recent defeat in an organizing vote at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn. In that vote the union wasn't opposed by the company but by Republican political leaders across Tennessee, who threatened to destroy the plant by withdrawing public subsidies if the union won. The vote was close, 53% to 47%. If 44 workers out of the more than 1,300 had voted differently, today we'd be talking about a union breakthrough instead of the end of organized labor in America. The most penetrating and unsentimental analysis of the event comes from former union organizer Rich Yeselson, here and here. Among other things, he observes that union organizing is hard no matter where you are, and certainly no easier in a traditionally anti-union region, in a factory where the treatment of workers is pretty good, and by a union that has allowed itself to give too much back to management in other plants as part of its effort to preserve the domestic auto industry. Back to Soltas. His original piece is here. It...

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Report: Minimum wage hike would cut food stamp spending by $4.6 billion a year

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from m.washingtonpost.com

Raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour would reduce federal food stamp spending by $4.6 billion a year, according to a report to be released Wednesday by the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress.

The proposal, a top legislative priority for President Obama and congressional Democrats, would reduce enrollment in the food stamp program by as much as 9.2 percent, the report said.
A report last month from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said about 15 percent of the nation’s workforce would see wages rise under Obama’s plan to raise the minimum wage, adding that the increase would lift 900,000 people out of poverty.

Democrats are making a midterm election year push to raise the federal minimum wage. Reid Wilson takes a look at what that would mean for two cities. (/)

The CAP report, which was written by University of California Berkeley researchers Rachel West and Michael Reich, is the latest in a line of research highlighting the connection between low-wage work and government support programs.
Last year, a report done by researchers at Berkeley and the University of Illinois asserted that taxpayers are spending nearly $7 billion a year to supplement the wages of fast-food workers, many of whom earn the minimum wage or close to it.
“What is the best way to make people independent and be able to sustain their standard of living without having to depend on government support?,” Reich asked. “It turns out that...




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Coal Company to Pay Record Civil Fine of $27.5 Million for Water Pollution

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

Settlement calls for Alpha Natural Resources to clean up water flowing from coal mines in five states. Under the agreement with U.S. and state regulators, Alpha will spend $200 million to reduce pollution from mines in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia. The company will also pay $27.5 million, the largest civil penalty ever for permit violations under the U.S. Clean Water Act, in connection with more than 6,000 such violations from 2006 to 2013. U.S. regulators said Alpha has “a long history of noncompliance with the Clean Water Act.” But a company official downplayed the extent of the violations, saying that Alpha’s ”total water-quality compliance rate,” taking into account pollutants at all of its operations, was 99.8 percent last year. The New York Times, The Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette Greenpeace report says Europe’s aging nuclear power plants pose an increasing risk. The report concludes that because of Europe’s heavy dependence on nuclear energy, governments are likely to extend plant operations 20 years or more past their designed limits. It recommends that European Union policies be changed to spur repairs and discourage construction of new plants. Like most nuclear plants, European reactors were built with a 40-year expected lifetime. As they age, operators usually have two options: shut down or make repairs to extend operations. While many critics want the plants to be...

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