by Mike Hall, Feb 25, 2007

When Confined Space founder Jordan Barab shut down the workplace health and safety blog to go to work with the House Education and Labor Committee to help strengthen the nation’s job safety laws, he didn’t stop keeping an eye on the headlines for news the safety community might find informative.

Check out these recent links from Jordan—and for a sobering reminder of the dangers all workers face every day on the job, see the latest Weekly Toll.

In Shafted: How the Bush Administration Reversed Decades of Progress on Mine Safety, Ken Ward Jr. traces the rise in coal mine deaths, culminating in last years’ decade-high death toll of 47, through the years of the Bush administration’s hold on the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Ward, a reporter for The Charleston Gazette writes in the Washington Monthly:

Under the Bush appointee Dave Lauriski, a former mining executive, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) has stressed cooperating with mine operators over policing them. During his tenure, he filled the agency’s top jobs with former industry colleagues, dropped more than a dozen safety proposals initiated during the Clinton administration, and cut almost 200 of the agency’s 1,200 coal mine inspectors. Mine-safety experts have linked many of these actions to the causes of deadly mine accidents since 2001.

Ward’s in-depth look at the mine safety failures under the Bush-run MSHA, is chilling.

In an Associated Press story, reporter Roxana Hegeman writes about the struggles of immigrant meatpacking workers in Kansas to join together in a union to bargain for safer working conditions.

Each day, 150 semi-trailers loaded with cattle arrive at Tyson Food Inc.’s Holcomb plant for slaughter. Each day workers here butcher 5,700 head of cattle.

And each day at least one meatpacker at the plant gets hurt on the job.

The Arizona Republic took a look at the worker injury and fatality statistics in the state and found that the risk for Latino laborers is far greater than the overall workforce.

Working in construction in the Valley has always been a dangerous career choice, probably since Phoenix’s founders dug a canal to divert water from the Salt River to farmland.

Nearly 140 years later, as Arizona’s building boom creates vast wealth and fuels some of the best economic growth in the nation, it is also killing and injuring workers.

An Arizona Republic analysis of state and federal data from 2003 to 2005 revealed that the increase in injuries and deaths for Hispanic workers far outpaced the increase in the workforce overall.

Next time you call for a pizza, you might think about a more generous tip for the workers in a job that most people wouldn’t consider dangerous. A recent story in the Jacksonville Times-Union shows the job can be deadly:

In the world of food delivery, getting robbed is nothing new. Every week, police reports show delivery drivers held at gunpoint for small amounts. And like a trip to the ATM, the criminals keep calling for pizzas and making their withdrawals.

With a regular spot in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics annual “10 Most Dangerous Jobs,” the roughly $8-an-hour delivery and service drivers ranked eighth in 2005 behind such jobs as loggers, pilots and steel workers. About a fourth of all delivery driver deaths are from crime, the rest are from traffic accidents.