In March 1999, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) cosponsored a Chemical and Biological Respiratory Protection Workshop with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Department of Defense, U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM). The objectives of this meeting were to: (1) identify and understand the hazards associated with a terrorist chemical and biological incident, (2) identify the different civilian responders and their respiratory protections needs, (3) determine which respirators and selection criteria are currently being used for response to these incidents, and (4) determine public and medical community concerns that must be considered in developing standards for chemical and biological respiratory protective devices. NIOSH began collaborating with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), OSHA and RDECOM, which includes Edgewood Chemical Biological Center (ECBC) and Natick Soldier Center (NSC), to address the concerns identified at the workshop, and to discuss the development of standards for emergency first responder respiratory protection. In April 2001, NIOSH held a public meeting on developing and implementing standards for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) respiratory protective devices. At the meeting it was announced that actual military chemical warfare agents (CWA) would be used in future NIOSH certification testing of CBRN respiratory protective devices. Sarin (GB) and sulfur mustard (HD) had been chosen as representative CWA in their categories. Respirator and other personal protective equipment (PPE) manufacturers requested that NIOSH identify chemical compounds that could be used as test simulants in lieu of GB and HD. These manufacturers expressed an interest in using CWA simulants for in-house material and product development testing and to pretest their respirator systems for CWA agent permeation resistance. Manufacturers do not have access to CWA to perform testing and there are a limited number of certified laboratories able to perform CWA testing because of the high cost, toxicity, and the extensive regulatory controls. This makes any type of CWA testing very expensive and inconvenient as a result of the required lead-time.

This publication is a revised edition of the NIOSH document Histoplasmosis: Protecting Workers at Risk, which was originally published in September 1997. The updated information in this publication will help readers understand what histoplasmosis is and recognize activities that may expose workers to the disease-causing fungus Histoplasma capsulatum. The publication also informs readers about methods they can use to protect themselves and others from exposure. Outbreaks of histoplasmosis have shared similar circumstances: People who did not know the health risks of breathing in the spores of H. capsulatum became ill and sometimes caused others nearby to become ill when they disturbed contaminated soil or accumulations of bird or bat manure. Because they were unaware of the hazard, they did not take protective measures that could have prevented illness. This publication will help prevent such exposures by serving as a guide for safety and health professionals, environmental consultants, supervisors, and others responsible for the safety and health of those working near material contaminated with H. capsulatum. Activities that pose a health risk to workers at these sites include disturbance of soil at an active or inactive bird roost or poultry house, excavation in regions where this fungus is endemic, and removal of bat or bird manure from buildings. Local, State, and national public health professionals may also find this publication useful for understanding the health risks of exposure to H. capsulatum so that they can provide guidance about work practices and personal protective equipment.

Manual material handling (MMH) work contributes to a large percentage of the over half a million cases of musculoskeletal disorders reported annually in the United States. Musculoskeletal disorders often involve strains and sprains to the lower back, shoulders, and upper limbs. They can result in protracted pain, disability, medical treatment, and financial stress for those afflicted with them, and employers often find themselves paying the bill, either directly or through workers' compensation insurance, at the same time they must cope with the loss of the full capacity of their workers. Scientific evidence shows that effective ergonomic interventions can lower the physical demands of MMH work tasks, thereby lowering the incidence and severity of the musculoskeletal injuries they can cause. Their potential for reducing injury-related costs alone makes ergonomic interventions a useful tool for improving a company's productivity, product quality, and overall business competitiveness. But very often productivity gets an additional and solid shot in the arm when managers and workers take a fresh look at how best to use energy, equipment, and exertion to get the job done in the most efficient, effective, and effortless way possible. Planning that applies these principles can result in big wins for all concerned. This booklet will help you to recognize high-risk MMH work tasks and choose effective options for reducing their physical demands. Illustrated inside you will find approaches like: Eliminating lifting from the floor and using simple transport devices like carts or dollies; Using lift-assist devices like scissors lift tables or load levelers; Using more sophisticated equipment like powered stackers, hoists, cranes, or vacuum assist devices; Guiding your choice of equipment by analyzing and redesigning work stations and workflow.

Ionizing radiation and its sources are used every day in medical, industrial and governmental facilities around the world. Although some health risks from ionizing radiation exposures are widely recognized, the association of these exposures to specific diseases, especially various types of cancer, remains uncertain. Workers at U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) facilities have produced nuclear weapons, provided nuclear fuel materials for power reactors, and conducted a wide spectrum of research related to nuclear safety and other scientific issues. While completing this work, many of the employees have been exposed to ionizing radiation and other potentially hazardous materials. Since 1991, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has conducted analytical epidemiologic studies of workers at DOE nuclear facilities, through a Memorandum of Understanding between the DOE and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). The agreement occurred in response to recommendations to the Secretary of Energy in 1989 by the independent Secretarial Panel for the Evaluation of Epidemiologic Research Activities (SPEERA). This technical report, entitled A Nested Case-Control Study of Leukemia and Ionizing Radiation at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, is one several products of the NIOSH Occupational Energy Research Program that are being published as a series. Most of these studies include detailed historical exposure assessments for radiation and other potentially hazardous agents so the health risks at different levels of exposure can be accurately estimated. Each of these studies contributes to the knowledge required to ensure that workers are adequately protected from chronic disease over their working lifetimes.

In 1897 a small landholder named Robert Eastham shot and killed timber magnate Frank Thompson in Tucker County, West Virginia, leading to a sensational trial that highlighted a clash between local traditions and modernizing forces. Ronald L. Lewis's book uses this largely forgotten episode as a window into contests over political, environmental, and legal change in turn-of-the-century Appalachia. The Eastham-Thompson feud pitted a former Confederate against a member of the new business elite who was, as a northern Republican, his cultural and political opposite. For Lewis, their clash was one flashpoint in a larger phenomenon central to US history in the second half of the nineteenth century: the often violent imposition of new commercial and legal regimes over holdout areas stretching from Appalachia to the trans-Missouri West. Taking a ground-level view of these so-called "wars of incorporation," Lewis's powerful microhistory shows just how strongly local communities guarded traditional relationships to natural resources. Modernizers sought to convict Eastham of murder, but juries drawn from the traditionalist population refused to comply. Although the resisters won the courtroom battle, the modernizers eventually won the war for control of the state's timber frontier.

Motion pictures are made, not mass produced, requiring a remarkable collection of skills, self-discipline, and sociality-all of which are sources of enormous pride among Hollywood's craft and creative workers. The interviews collected here showcase the ingenuity, enthusiasm, and aesthetic pleasures that attract people to careers in the film and television industries. They also reflect critically on changes in the workplace brought about by corporate conglomeration and globalization. Rather than offer publicity-friendly anecdotes by marquee celebrities, Voices of Labor presents off-screen observations about the everyday realities of Global Hollywood. Ranging across job categories-from showrunner to make-up artist to location manager-this collection features voices of labor from Los Angeles, Atlanta, Prague, and Vancouver. Together they show how seemingly abstract concepts like conglomeration, financialization, and globalization are crucial tools for understanding contemporary Hollywood and for reflecting more generally on changes and challenges in the screen media workplace and our culture at large. Despite such formidable concerns, what nevertheless shines through is a commitment to craftwork and collaboration that provides the means to imagine and instigate future alternatives for screen media labor.

Public awareness of the potential for healthcare to actually be the source of harm to patients through exposure to infectious agents, unintended error or known side effects of hazardous treatments has spawned a highly visible "patient safety" movement. Less visible, however, is the risk this same environment and these same hazards impose on the health of the women and men who work there. Although often thought of as clean and safe, workplaces in the Healthcare and Social Assistance (HCSA) sector are associated with many of the same types of exposures to chemicals and hazards found in "blue collar" industrial settings. The HCSA sector is burdened by the historical and entrenched belief that patient care issues supersede the personal safety and health of workers and that it is acceptable for HCSA workers to have less than optimal protections against the risks of hazardous exposures or injuries. Because patients and providers share the healthcare environment, efforts to protect patients and providers can be complimentary, even synergistic, when pursued through a comprehensive, integrated approach. In order to address occupational safety and health issues of the nation, including those of the HCSA sector, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) is working with a range of partners to develop an updated National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA). Each industrial sector is being ad-dressed by a group of experts and stakeholders called a NORA sector council. This publication addresses the research needs of the occupational safety and health community within the Healthcare and Social Assistance (HCSA) industrial sector. This important industrial sector represents about 11% of the U.S. workforce-approximately 17.4 million workers in 2006-of which 80% are in healthcare. The HCSA sector contains 12 of the 20 fastest growing occupations, and the projected growth of this sector through 2014 exceeds that of any other industrial sector. Workers in the HCSA sector are exposed to a wide range of health and safety hazards including infectious, chemical, and physical agents; lifting and repetitive tasks (ergonomic hazards); stress (psychological hazards); workplace violence; and risks associated with suboptimal organization of work.

Thomas Hodgskin (1787 - 1869) was an English socialist writer on political economy, critic of capitalism and defender of free trade and early trade unions. He used Ricardo's labour theory of value to denounce the appropriation of the most part of value produced by the labour of industrial workers as illegitimate. He propounded these views in a series of lectures at the London Mechanics Institute (later renamed Birkbeck, University of London) where he debated with William Thompson, with whom he shared the critique of capitalist expropriation but not the proposed remedy. The results of these lectures and debates he published as "Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital" (1825), "Popular Political Economy" (1827) and "Natural and Artificial Right of Property Contrasted" (1832). The title of "Labour Defended" was a jibe at James Mill's earlier "Commerce Defended" and signalled his opposition to the latter taking sides with the capitalists against their employees. Despite his high profile in the agitated revolutionary times of the 1820s, he retreated into the realm of Whig journalism after the Reform Act 1832. He became an advocate of free trade and spent 15 years writing for The Economist. He worked on the paper with its founder, James Wilson, and with the young Herbert Spencer. Hodgskin viewed the demise of the Corn Laws as the first step to the downfall of government, and his libertarian anarchism was regarded as too radical by many of the liberals of the Anti-Corn Law League. He left The Economist in 1857, but continued working as a journalist for the rest of his life.

1842 was a year of crisis in Britain, and no more so than in the West Riding town of Halifax. A great strike of all trades took place across England in 1842. It reached its zenith in the industrial towns of the north, starting in the small communities of Lancashire and quickly spreading to the West Riding of Yorkshire as Lancashire marchers poured across the Pennines. In hand with its neighbouring town of Huddersfield, Halifax was noted for its opposition to the New Poor Law which, in 1834, attempted to abolish outdoor relief for the poor, for its support of a maximum ten-hour working day and the Chartists' call for workers' voting rights. When Bradford publican 'Fat Peter' Bussey attended the first Chartist Convention in London in 1839, he took with him the West Riding petition bearing 52,800 signatures, 25 percent of which had been given at Halifax. This book discusses the efforts made by the men and women of Halifax in these early years of organised agitation for social reform, their 'clandestine meetings and nightly drilling', their 'determination, resilience and militancy' to gain a say in the laws under which they lived. It tells of the fight for the legislative rights of workers like seventeen-year-old Patience Kershaw, who dragged loads of coal for twelve hours each day along narrow and dangerous passages under the hills of Halifax. When the Lancashire marchers arrived at Halifax in the hot summer of 1842, the cavalry attempted to clear the streets with their sabres and a violent response was inevitable, arrests quickly followed. The climax came when many hundreds of the men and women of Halifax fought against British soldiers on 16th August 1842, an event which led to the humiliation of a proud platoon of Prince Albert's Own and to the death of at least six men of Halifax.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1920 Edition.

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1898 Edition.

Throughout the twentieth century, despite compelling evidence that some pesticides posed a threat to human and environmental health, growers and the USDA continued to favor agricultural chemicals over cultural and biological forms of pest control. In Ghostworkers and Greens, Adam Tompkins reveals a history of unexpected cooperation between farmworker groups and environmental organizations. Tompkins shows that the separate movements shared a common concern about the effects of pesticides on human health. This enabled bridge-builders within the disparate organizations to foster cooperative relationships around issues of mutual concern to share information, resources, and support.Nongovernmental organizations, particularly environmental organizations and farmworker groups, played a key role in pesticide reform. For nearly fifty years, these groups served as educators, communicating to the public scientific and experiential information about the adverse effects of pesticides on human health and the environment, and built support for the amendment of pesticide policies and the alteration of pesticide use practices. Their efforts led to the passage of more stringent regulations to better protect farmworkers, the public, and the environment. Environmental organizations and farmworker groups also acted as watchdogs, monitoring the activity of regulatory agencies and bringing suit when necessary to ensure that they fulfilled their responsibilities to the public. These groups served as not only lobbyists but also essential components of successful democratic governance, ensuring public participation and more effective policy implementation.

Casino Women is a pioneering look at the female face of corporate gaming. Based on extended interviews with maids, cocktail waitresses, cooks, laundry workers, dealers, pit bosses, managers, and vice presidents, the book describes in compelling detail a world whose enormous profitability is dependent on the labor of women assigned stereotypically female occupations-making beds and serving food on the one hand and providing sexual allure on the other. But behind the neon lies another world, peopled by thousands of remarkable women who assert their humanity in the face of gaming empires' relentless quest for profits.The casino women profiled here generally fall into two groups. Geoconda Arguello Kline, typical of the first, arrived in the United States in the 1980s fleeing the war in Nicaragua. Finding work as a Las Vegas hotel maid, she overcame her initial fear of organizing and joined with others to build the preeminent grassroots union in the nation-the 60,000-member Culinary Union-becoming in time its president. In Las Vegas, "the hottest union city in America," the collective actions of union activists have won economic and political power for tens of thousands of working Nevadans and their families. The story of these women's transformation and their success in creating a union able to face off against global gaming giants form the centerpiece of this book.Another group of women, dealers and middle managers among them, did not act. Fearful of losing their jobs, they remained silent, declining to speak out when others were abused, and in the case of middle managers, taking on the corporations' goals as their own. Susan Chandler and Jill B. Jones appraise the cost of their silence and examine the factors that pushed some women into activism and led others to accept the status quo.Casino Women will appeal to all readers interested in women, gambling, and working-class life, and in how ordinary people stand up to corporate actors who appear to hold all the cards.

OSHA is generally responsible for setting and enforcing occupational safety and health standards in the nation's workplaces. OSHA carries out enforcement directly in 34 states and territories, while the remaining 22 have chosen to administer their own enforcement programs (state-run programs) under plans approved by OSHA. GAO was asked to review issues related to state-run programs. This report examines (1) what challenges states face in administering their safety and health programs, and (2) how OSHA responds to state-run programs with performance issues. GAO reviewed relevant federal laws, regulations and OSHA policies; conducted a survey of 22 state-run programs; and interviewed officials in OSHA's national office, all 10 OSHA regions, and from a nongeneralizable sample of 5 state-run programs; and interviewed labor and business associations and safety and health experts. State-run programs face several challenges that primarily relate to staffing, and include having constrained budgets, according to OSHA and state officials. States have difficulty filling vacant inspector positions, obtaining training for inspectors, and retaining qualified inspectors. Recruiting inspectors is difficult due to the shortage of qualified candidates, relatively low state salaries, and hiring freezes. Although OSHA has taken steps to make its courses more accessible to states, obtaining inspector training continues to be difficult. According to an agency official, OSHA's Training Institute faces several challenges in delivering training, including recruiting and retaining instructors, difficulty accommodating the demand for training, and limitations in taking some courses to the field due to the need for special equipment and facilities. These challenges are further exacerbated by states' lack of travel funds, which limit state inspectors' access to OSHA training. Retaining qualified inspectors is another challenge among states. Officials noted that, once state inspectors are trained, they often leave for higher paying positions in the private sector or federal government. GAO's survey of the 22 state-run programs that cover private and public sector workplaces showed that turnover was more prevalent among safety inspectors than health inspectors. Nearly half of these states reported that at least 40 percent of their safety inspectors had fewer than 5 years of service. In contrast, half of the states reported that at least 40 percent of their health inspectors had more than 10 years of service. These staffing challenges have limited the capacity of some state-run programs to meet their inspection goals. OSHA has responded in a variety of ways to state-run programs with performance issues. These include closely monitoring and assisting such states, such as accompanying state staff during inspections and providing additional training on how to document inspections. OSHA has also drawn attention to poor state performance by communicating its concerns to the governor and other high-level state officials. In addition, OSHA has shared enforcement responsibilities with struggling states or, as a last resort, has resumed sole responsibility for federal enforcement when a state has voluntarily withdrawn its program. Although OSHA evaluates state-run programs during its annual reviews, GAO found that OSHA does not hold states accountable for addressing issues in a timely manner or establish time frames for when to resume federal enforcement when necessary. In addition, the current statutory framework may not permit OSHA to quickly resume concurrent enforcement authority with the state when a state is struggling with performance issues. As a result, a state's performance problems can continue for years. OSHA officials acknowledged the need for a mechanism that allows them to intervene more quickly in such circumstances. GAO-13-320

This is a new release of the original 1923 edition.

The world was shocked in April 2013 when more than 1100 garment workers lost their lives in the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory complex in Dhaka. It was the worst industrial tragedy in the two-hundred-year history of mass apparel manufacture. This so-called accident was, in fact, just waiting to happen, and not merely because of the corruption and exploitation of workers so common in the garment industry. In Achieving Workers' Rights in the Global Economy, Richard P. Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein argue that such tragic events, as well as the low wages, poor working conditions, and voicelessness endemic to the vast majority of workers who labor in the export industries of the global South arise from the very nature of world trade and production. Given their enormous power to squeeze prices and wages, northern brands and retailers today occupy the commanding heights of global capitalism. Retail-dominated supply chains-such as those with Walmart, Apple, and Nike at their heads-generate at least half of all world trade and include hundreds of millions of workers at thousands of contract manufacturers from Shenzhen and Shanghai to Sao Paulo and San Pedro Sula. This book offers an incisive analysis of this pernicious system along with essays that outline a set of practical guides to its radical reform.

Throughout the twentieth century, despite compelling evidence that some pesticides posed a threat to human and environmental health, growers and the USDA continued to favor agricultural chemicals over cultural and biological forms of pest control. In Ghostworkers and Greens, Adam Tompkins reveals a history of unexpected cooperation between farmworker groups and environmental organizations. Tompkins shows that the separate movements shared a common concern about the effects of pesticides on human health. This enabled bridge-builders within the disparate organizations to foster cooperative relationships around issues of mutual concern to share information, resources, and support.Nongovernmental organizations, particularly environmental organizations and farmworker groups, played a key role in pesticide reform. For nearly fifty years, these groups served as educators, communicating to the public scientific and experiential information about the adverse effects of pesticides on human health and the environment, and built support for the amendment of pesticide policies and the alteration of pesticide use practices. Their efforts led to the passage of more stringent regulations to better protect farmworkers, the public, and the environment. Environmental organizations and farmworker groups also acted as watchdogs, monitoring the activity of regulatory agencies and bringing suit when necessary to ensure that they fulfilled their responsibilities to the public. These groups served as not only lobbyists but also essential components of successful democratic governance, ensuring public participation and more effective policy implementation.