Vagina Dialogues

After all, who knows more about women's health issues than middle aged men? Trust them, silly girlies!

Women's Health Experts Speak Out from Judd Nelson

The Human Cost of Free Shipping

3pl is the abbreviation for a third party logistics contractor. These contractors provide services such as: warehousing, packaging, inventory management, and freight forwarding. Many big companies use 3pls. Last week I wrote about Hershey exploiting foreign labor. Hershey's 3pl contractor, Exel, was fined for safety violations. Exel is the largest 3pl in the United States.

Mother Jones Magazine
has published an expose done by writer Mac McClelland, who went undercover at one of the biggest 3pls: Amalgamated Product Giant Shipping Worldwide Inc.

Before she even starts the job, Mac is counseled by a woman at the local chamber of commerce not to take anything that they say to her personally. Mac asks if people are going to be mean to her:

She smiles. "Oh, yeah." This town somewhere west of the Mississippi is not big; everyone knows someone or is someone who's worked for Amalgamated. "But look at it from their perspective. They need you to work as fast as possible to push out as much as they can as fast as they can. So they're gonna give you goals, and then you know what? If you make those goals, they're gonna increase the goals. But they'll be yelling at you all the time. It's like the military. They have to break you down so they can turn you into what they want you to be. So they're going to tell you, 'You're not good enough, you're not good enough, you're not good enough,' to make you work harder. Don't say, 'This is the best I can do.' Say, 'I'll try,' even if you know you can't do it. Because if you say, 'This is the best I can do,' they'll let you go. They hire and fire constantly, every day. You'll see people dropping all around you. But don't take it personally and break down or start crying when they yell at you."

Mac goes through the training. She is assigned to be a "picker" someone who locates, scans, and puts the requested item in a bin on a conveyor belt. The pickers are assigned to a particular section of the vast warehouses:

The place is immense. Cold, cavernous. Silent, despite thousands of people quietly doing their picking, or standing along the conveyors quietly packing or box-taping, nothing noisy but the occasional whir of a passing forklift. My scanner tells me in what exact section—there are nine merchandise sections, so sprawling that there's a map attached to my ID badge—of vast shelving systems the item I'm supposed to find resides. It also tells me how many seconds it thinks I should take to get there. Dallas sector, section yellow, row H34, bin 22, level D: wearable blanket. Battery-operated flour sifter. Twenty seconds. I count how many steps it takes me to speed-walk to my destination: 20. At 5-foot-9, I've got a decently long stride, and I only cover the 20 steps and locate the exact shelving unit in the allotted time if I don't hesitate for one second or get lost or take a drink of water before heading in the right direction as fast as I can walk or even occasionally jog.

Most of the people working at this site aren't even permanent employees. The 3pls use temps, because they can pay them less and provide them no benefits.

From the temp agency, Amalgamated has ordered the exact number of humans it should take to fill this week's orders if we work at top capacity. Lots of retailers use temporary help in peak season, and online ones are no exception. But lots of warehousing and distribution centers like this also use temps year-round. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that more than 15 percent of pickers, packers, movers, and unloaders are temps. They make $3 less an hour on average than permanent workers. And they can be "temporary" for years. There are so many temps in this warehouse that the staffing agency has its own office here. Industry consultants describe the temp-staffing business as "very, very busy." "On fire." Maximizing profits means making sure no employee has a slow day, means having only as many employees as are necessary to get the job done, the number of which can be determined and ordered from a huge pool of on-demand labor literally by the day. Often, temp workers have to call in before shifts to see if they'll get work. Sometimes, they're paid piece rate, according to the number of units they fill or unload or move. Always, they can be let go in an instant, and replaced just as quickly.

The typical work day is a blur. No cell phones are allowed inside, so workers who need to check on their children have to stash their cell phones in a break room notorious for theft. The pickers cover, on average, about 12 miles a day; on cold concrete flooring. This is destined to generate a great deal of physical pain.

Indeed, and I'm working for a gigantic, immensely profitable company. Or for the staffing company that works for that company, anyway. Which is a nice arrangement, because temporary-staffing agencies keep the stink of unacceptable labor conditions off the companies whose names you know. When temps working at a Walmart warehouse sued for not getting paid for all their hours, and for then getting sent home without pay for complaining, Walmart—not technically their employer—wasn't named as a defendant. (Though Amazon has been named in a similar suit.) Temporary staffers aren't legally entitled to decent health care because they are just short-term "contractors" no matter how long they keep the same job. They aren't entitled to raises, either, and they don't get vacation and they'd have a hell of a time unionizing and they don't have the privilege of knowing if they'll have work on a particular day or for how long they'll have a job. And that is how you slash prices and deliver products superfast and offer free shipping and still post profits in the millions or billions.

The workers are working in inhuman conditions at an inhuman pace. Pain is a constant. Increasing numbers of companies are relying on the services of 3pls. It's unlikely that most companies are aware of the way the workers in these warehouses are exploited. Meanwhile, the bad economy guarantees a constant labor pool of people so desperate that they will take these jobs. That's what the 3pls are counting on.

It won't come as a surprise that many of these giant warehouses are in right to work states.

The entire story is 4 pages long. Please read the whole thing - it's filled with terrible and important information.

Exploiting Foreign Student Labor: No Kisses for You

Cultural awareness or corporate exploitation? From the October 16, 2011 NY Times:

The college student from Moldova was in the United States on a cultural exchange program run for half a century by the federal government, a program designed to build international understanding by providing foreign students with a dream summer of fun in America. So he summoned his best English for the e-mail he sent to the State Department in June.

“Pleas hellp,” wrote the student, Tudor Ureche. He told them about “the miserable situation in which I’ve found myself cought” since starting a job under the program in a plant packing Hershey’s chocolates near the company’s namesake town in Pennsylvania.

Students from other countries pay as much as $6,000 to come to the US as part of this program. They're expecting to be able to make friends, work on their English speaking skills, sightsee, and have a summer job. A combination of education, work, and fun, in other words. The fun seems to have been left out of the equation.

Instead, many students who were placed at the packing plant found themselves working grueling night shifts on speeding production lines, repeatedly lifting boxes weighing as much as 60 pounds and financially drained by low pay and unexpected extra costs for housing and transportation. Their complaints to the contractor running the program on behalf of the State Department were met with threats that they could be sent home.

and

The students, who were earning about $8 an hour, said they were isolated within the plant, rarely finding moments to practice English or socialize with Americans. With little explanation or accounting, the sponsor took steep deductions from their paychecks for housing, transportation and insurance that left many of them too little money to afford the tourist wanderings they had eagerly anticipated.

Essentially, these students paid to come here and be exploited for the summer. After they're gouged for housing and transportation costs they earn next to nothing, and in this case, they were working in unsafe conditions. It seems likely that this is NOT the kind of "international understanding" that the State Dept. was hoping to foster.

UPDATE:

Hershey's packing subcontractor is fined for safety violations. From the February 21, 2012 NY Times:

After a six-month investigation prompted by the protests of student workers on an international exchange program, the Labor Department on Tuesday issued fines of $283,000 for health and safety violations against a company that operates a plant in Pennsylvania packing Hershey’s chocolates, saying it had covered up serious injuries to workers.

The 24-page citation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found that the company, Exel, intentionally failed to report 42 serious injuries over four years to workers at the plant in Palmyra, Pa., or 43 percent of all such injuries in that period at the plant. The injuries, which were discovered by safety inspectors during their investigation, required medical treatment, and many were related to lifting and moving big boxes of Hershey’s chocolates along a packing line.

and

found that Exel (the subcontractor) had not recorded dozens of injuries. They also determined that that failure was not the result of ignorance, that they were deliberately not recording injuries. OSHA also determined that in 6 of the 9 violations, Exel willfully failed to protect workers; hence the high fines. Naturally, Exel is going to appeal the fines.

Labor officials said they had found an e-mail in which Exel managers explicitly decided not to provide audio protection for workers in the noisy plant, even though they were aware of the problem.

and

Jennifer J. Rosenbaum, legal director of the Guestworker Alliance, said the packing was too strenuous for an American worker to perform for a long time. “It was just another way they were turning long-term factory jobs into a job that even a 20-year-old student could not survive for more than a few months.”

The only reason we know anything about this, is because some 200 of the students walked off the job in Palmyra, some carrying signs. It was the first labor strike at the anti-union plant. Fining Excel is a good first step, but this entire program program is in need of an overhaul.

For more on the way these foreign students are exploited, check out this 2010 Associated Press investigation.


cross-posted at MainSt/workingamerica.org

Women Earn Less in the Restaurant Business

A new report on gender inequity in the restaurant industry called Tipped Over the Edge was recently released. The executive summary and the full report are available at those links, in PDF form.

This is a 40 page report, and I’ve just skimmed the surface of it. All of this is very familiar territory to me–I worked in the restaurant industry for 20 years.

There are over 10 million restaurant workers in the United States. Approximately 52% of them are women. 66% of tipped workers are women. Tipped workers can be payed a sub minimum wage, which creates legalized gender inequity. From the report:

The restaurant industry is one of the only sectors in which predominately male positions have a different minimum wage than predominately female positions: non-tipped work- ers (52 percent male) have a federal minimum wage of $7.25, while tipped workers (66 percent female) have a federal subminimum wage of $2.13.

The federal rate is $2.13, though some states have a higher rate. Alaska, Montana, Minnesota, and California have eliminated the sub minimum wage. The federal sub minimum wage of $2.13 has been the same since 1991.

Female restaurant workers are paid less than their male counterparts for two primary reasons. First, they are concentrated in lower-paying segments such as quick-serve and family style, and second, they are not able to access the highest-paying positions in the industry. Women fill only 19 percent of chef positions, one of the highest paying restaurant positions with a median wage of $19.23. And at the lowest end of the pay scale, women are highly concentrated in four of the ten lowest paid occupations of any industry: host, counter attendant, combined food prep and serving worker, and server.

(Maryland Rep> Donna Edwards has filed the Wages Act which would increase the federal minimum wage for tipped employees. The subminimum wage has been frozen at $2.13 for 21 years. An increase would provide a little more financial security for tipped employees in a bad economy.)

Then there’s health care, or lack thereof:

These wage inequities are exacerbated by lack of benefits that prevent restaurant workers from properly caring for their health and their families.Of the more than 4,300 restaurant workers ROC surveyed across the country, 90 percent lack paid sick days and 90 percent do not receive health insurance through their employers. One third of all female restaurant workers (33.4 percent) lack any kind of health care, whether provided by their employer or otherwise. More than a quarter (26.8 percent) of all female restaurant workers are mothers,and more than one in ten are single mothers,25 so the lack of paid sick leave and workplace flexibility creates an additional burden for women in the industry.

Sick people who can’t afford to take a day off go to work, where they prepare and serve food.

The low pay isn’t the only problem:

A recent MSNBC review of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) data revealed that from January to November 2011, almost 37 percent of all EEOC charges by women regarding sexual harassment came from the restaurant industry, even though less than 7 percent of employed women work in the restaurant industry.

The EEOC has identified the restaurant industry as the largest source of sexual harassment claims.

What I’ve seen in the report confirms what I learned from my own experiences in restaurants. I started out as a server, but quickly learned where the real money was, and learned to bartend and cook.

The flexible schedule worked fairly well for me as a single mother, but restaurant scheduling is often subject to last minute change, which can be` a real problem for women who have child care or elder care responsibilities. Many restaurants consistently overstaff the dining room, in case it gets busy. It’s not unusual to get sent home halfway through a shift, having made very little money. That subminimum wage paycheck doesn’t pay the bills.

Sexual harassment is certainly plentiful, as is discrimination. I worked in one kitchen where postcards of bare chested women adorned the walls. The chef had giant posters of scantily clad, silicone enhanced women in his office. To call it a hostile work environment doesn’t really do the situation justice. He didn’t want women working in his kitchen, and I didn’t stay long.

To be fair, I’ve also worked in a few great restaurants where the staff were treated like family, and even a few that offered health care benefits, which is a rarity.

As a server, getting sent home on a slow night, with little or no tip money was both painful and frightening. The industry is able to pay substandard wages because servers are tipped. Relying on the whims of the public for a paycheck can also be painful and frightening. One can provide excellent service and still receive no tip. The type of restaurant one works in is also a big factor. The tips are better in fine dining – but that isn’t an option for everyone.

The restaurant industry isn’t just “able” to pay substandard wages. They RELY on paying substandard wages, and they lobby fiercely for their right to do so. Right now in Florida, the legislature is considering a bill that would cut the subminimum wage for tipped employees in half. From Raw Story:

A Florida Senate committee has followed the advice of a restaurant association and passed a bill that would cut the minimum wage for tipped workers by more than half.

The bill, SB 2106, would slash the current Florida tipped minimum wage of of $4.65 an hour to the federal standard of of $2.13 an hour.

And:

“We are being brave and bold and being statesmen and not politicians,” Republican state Sen. Nancy Detert, the committee’s chair, asserted, adding that the bill had been requested by the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association.

Associated Industries of Florida and the Florida Chamber of Commerce have also expressed support for the bill.

I wasn’t aware that cutting the subminimum wage qualified one as a “statesman.”

One of those restaurant employees, Charles Spencer, is working at Raglan Road Irish Pub and Restaurant in Orlando to pay for his education. He told the Sentinel that the $11 or $12 an hour he currently makes barely pays the bills.

“It’s a lot of canned vegetables and grilled chicken and ramen noodles,” Spencer explained. “I was rather appalled by the fact they’re going to try to cut a wage standard in this economy.”

The Florida AFL-CIO’s Rich Templin said that the bill would effectively mean a more than $2.50 an hour pay cut for a waitress currently making $14 an hour.

This is shocking – in a bad economy, they would cut an already substandard subminimum wage? How very Dickensian.

To bring it back to the original topic; that cut in the subminimum wage in Florida would disproportionately hurt women, who make up the majority of tipped employees. At a time where people are dining out less, and tips aren’t as big as they once were, it’s a remarkable show of greed on the part of the restaurant industry, to try to cut an already criminally low wage.


cross-posted at MainSt/workingamerica.org

San Francisco Audit Reveals Massive Foreclosure Abuse

San Francisco recently carried out an audit on a number of foreclosures. Their findings were released in a report this week that shows just how rampant mortgage fraud has been. From Reuters:

The audit of almost 400 foreclosures in San Francisco found that 84 percent of them appeared to be illegal, according to the study released by the California city on Wednesday.

Similar studies around the country show comparable results. These numbers are astounding. And worse, they've essentially gotten away with it.

In many cases during the housing bubble that burst in 2008, original mortgages were repackaged and sold to so many investors

that it is now unclear who actually holds the loans

O'Brien could only find the current owners of the mortgages he studied in 287 out of 473 cases.

In the San Francisco study, which studied properties subject to foreclosure sales between January 2009 to November 2011, 45 per cent were sold to entities improperly claiming to be the owner of the loan.

"It is not impossible that there are homeowners who are alleged to have defaulted on loans to which they never fully agreed to and, further, are being foreclosed upon by lenders that might not even own such loans," the report stated.

This should be unimaginable. Instead it is chilling - the story of a largely unregulated financial industry gone amuck. The consequences to homeowners and their families is devastating. Of course the most chilling aspect of the whole mess is that the banks have never admitted to any wrongdoing. There have been no prosecutions. No banksters are wearing orange prison jumpsuits as a result of their role in defrauding millions of US homeowners.

Seth is right. The banks did get off too easy in the foreclosure/fraud settlement.


Cross-posted at MainSt/workingamerica.org

Pants Ablaze

After reading David Brochu’s recent “you kids get off my lawn” piece about Facebook in the Sun, I am only slightly chagrinned to admit that not only do I have a Facebook page; I also have a Twitter account. I tweet, but mostly I follow (or read) the tweets of others. Some of the folks I follow on Twitter are NH state legislators. None of them are from Carroll County. In the past, our local legislators were barely able to access their email accounts, but times have changed. Laurie Pettengill, Norman Tregenza, and Frank McCarthy all have Facebook accounts! I thought I’d found Frank on Twitter, but upon reading further, I decided that “Frank McCarthy: Sailor Dude and Wireless Broadband Hero” was probably not our local legislator.

Some legislators are prolific tweeters. State Representative Al Baldasaro is a frequent tweeter, and from his tweets, I have learned that he spends nearly every weekend in the state he came from: Massachusetts. Instead of sending us a thank you card for providing cheap booze and cigarettes, Massachusetts prefers instead to send us their lunatics, misanthropes, and malcontents.

NH House Majority Leader DJ Bettencourt is a frequent tweeter. On February 4 he tweeted: “GOP House Agenda ‘12: Focuses squarely on getting the 38,000 of our friends and neighbors who remain unemployed back to work.” I was glad to read this. It warms the sclerotic cockles of my hard little heart to learn that AFTER the NH GOP House finishes up with their social engineering agenda (repealing marriage equality, making kids stand for the pledge of allegiance, guns for abusers, ensuring that women are barefoot and pregnant, taking over the judiciary, and privatizing our jails and schools) that they intend to engage in that laser like focus on job creation they promised us back in 2010.

The promised laser has yet to materialize. Freshman State Rep. J.R. Hoell is sponsoring a whopping 26 bills (that’s approximately $39,000 worth) this session. One would think that at least one would be related somehow to job creation, but one would be wrong. There are 6 gun bills and 3 that are related to deadly force. There are 6 anti-education bills, 2 anti-women bills, and the rest is a mixed bag. HB 1342 would prohibit state and local governments from using funds to employ a lobbyist. So much for local control. In fact, fans of local control would do well to pay attention to this legislature, because they’ve filed a number of Big Brother Bills.

One bill that has received the kind of derisive national attention NH should be getting used to is HB 1574, which would eliminate the requirement that an employer give an employee a lunch break after 5 hours on the job. Apparently in randworld all employers are just warm fuzzies who insist on coddling their employees, so there’s no need for actual RULES. In defense of this bill, Rep. Hoell is quoted as saying, “If they are not letting people have lunch, they could put it out though the news media, through social media I don’t think that abusive behavior would continue, the way communications are today.” I appreciate Hoell’s enthusiasm for social media, but he’s being awfully optimistic. After all, there has been tons of ridicule heaped on the GOP controlled NH House, and they haven’t resigned en masse.

Laconia Rep. Harry Accornero’s bill requiring students to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance has just cleared the Constitutional Review Committee, and will be voted on by the full house. One may well wonder how this bill passed through any committee, never mind a Constitutional Review committee. It’s a poorly written bit of nonsense, that doesn’t stipulate any kind of penalty. Will the treasonous teens that refuse to stand be carted off to Guantanamo Bay? Rep. Lawrence Kappler says, “Standing is a sign of national patriotism.” Certainly there’s no better way to teach patriotism than the use of force. As a side note, the US is the only democracy that requires students to swear a loyalty oath every day.

In other legislative related news, a new report from the N.H. Center for Public Policy Studies finds that as state funding decreases, the reliance on property tax is increasing. In other words, all of those taxes and fees that have been either decreased or eliminated (like the tobacco tax) may sound pretty, but the end result is that your property taxes are going up. The Center found that property taxes comprised about 60% of city, town, and school spending. As the state continues to eliminate revenue sources at every opportunity, you can be sure that your property taxes will continue to increase exponentially. Perhaps in time, even the most knee jerk party supporters will begin to understand that the GOP mantra of “NH doesn’t have a revenue problem” is being uttered by people whose pants are ablaze.


Speaking of pants on fire, Speaker of the NH House, William O’Brien should be at the Shriner’s Burn Hospital right about now. Last year GOP Rep. Susan Emerson accused O’Brien of screaming and swearing at her because he objected to her amendments to the House budget bill. Because of that incident, Emerson and a bi-partisan group of legislators filed HB 1533, a bill preventing bullying in the state house and legislative office building. In a recent interview with Kevin Landrigan of the Nashua Telegraph, the Speaker denied that this ever took place. In fact, the Speaker accused Rep. Emerson of fabricating the story and being “emotional.” Ah, those silly girlies – always so emotional. Sadly for the Speaker, the state trooper who served as the Senate sergeant-at-arms last year, and the chorus director for the school chorus singing the national anthem that day have both acknowledged that Susan Emerson is telling the truth. That means the Speaker of the NH House, a man who has brought nothing but shame to our state, is also a bold faced liar.

Be sure to ask your local state reps why they aren’t asking for O’Brien to step down. Remember, Laurie Pettengill was a strong O’Brien supporter, and Gene Chandler is a member of the O’Brien leadership team.

Is this what you voted for?




© sbruce 2012

Published as an op-ed in the February 17, 2012 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper.

Fighting Medicare Fraud

The Dept. of Justice and the Dept. of Health and Human Services have taken serious action to combat Medicare fraud —and it’s working. From the Huffington Post:

Federal authorities say they recovered $4.1 billion in health care fraud judgments last year, a record high which officials on Monday credited to new tools for cracking down on deceitful Medicare claims.
The recovered funds are up roughly 50 percent from 2009.


That's huge!

"Fighting fraud is one of our top priorities and we have recovered an unprecedented number of taxpayer dollars," Sebelius said in a statement. "Our efforts strengthen the integrity of our health care programs, and meet the president's call for a return to American values that ensure everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules."

and

Officials credited the spike in recovered funds in part to strike force teams set up in fraud hot spots around the country, including Miami, Detroit and Los Angeles.

The teams charged 323 defendants, who collectively billed the Medicare program more than $1 billion last year. That includes a massive bust in February 2011, in which more than 100 doctors, nurses and physical therapists were charged with fraud in nine states. Stopping Medicare's budget from hemorrhaging that money will be key to paying for President Barack Obama's health care overhaul.

By focusing on eliminating Medicare fraud, the Justice Dept, and the DHHS have recovered $4.1 million, up 50% from 2009. It’s a success of the Affordable Care Act we can already see. That's good news for Medicare, for the Obama administration, and most of all, good news for U.S. taxpayers.



Cross-posted at MainSt/workingamerica.org

Maine Legislators Kill Voter ID Bill

Maine legislators vote to kill Voter ID. From Think Progress:

Though Republicans enjoy full control over Maine’s lawmaking process, they’ve dropped a push to require certain photo identification in order to vote.

Though Maine Republicans were considering voter ID legislation at the beginning of the year, Democrats vociferously objected because the bill could prevent thousands of Mainers from voting, particularly elderly individuals. On Friday, Republicans acceded to those objections, striking the voter ID language from an election law bill. This is the second time voter ID has failed to pass the GOP-controlled Maine legislature. Last year, a voter ID bill failed in the Senate after first being passed by the House.

It does speak well for them that they were concerned about disenfranchising elderly voters. But:

Maine Republicans were chastened during the 2011 session after they passed a bill to eliminate the state’s 38 year-old law allowing for Election Day registration, only to see their move overturned by a citizens veto in November. More than 60 percent of Mainers rebuked the legislature and voted to restore Election Day registration.

This is the real bottom line. Over 60% of Maine voters trounced them with a citizen's veto. They don't want to get that kind of a public spanking any time soon.


In place of this bill, the legislature voted in favor of a resolution. From Maine Public Broadcasting Network:

Put in its place was a resolve calling on the Secretary of State to study changes that might need to be made to Maine's election system, "So that when we do do something there won't be this tugging back and forth and running out to a people's veto," says Republican Committee member Sen. Deb Plowman of Hampden.

Plowman is referring to a vote that happened over another voting rights issue. In November, Maine voters soundly overturned a new law pushed by Republicans that banned the decades-old practice of allowing Election Day voter registration.

and

But Shenna Bellows of the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine challenged the need for legislators to call for a study. "In these difficult economic times, it's irresponsible to waste taxpayer resources on a study to tell the secretary of state to do his job. It is not necessary to use a study to fix clerical errors or administrative errors," Bellows says.

Summers says his primary concern is people voting when they shouldn't be. He says his office is actively investigating instances of non-citizens participating in elections.


In September 2011, I wrote about Maine's GOP Chair trying to create proof of widespread voter fraud by coming up with a list of 200 students that he claimed were voting fraudulently in Maine. This proved to be untrue, in all 200 cases - but this was the "reasoning" used to gin up folks to support a Voter ID law.

The resolution isn't necessary, given that the Secretary of State was the one who investigated the nonexistent student voter fraud From the Bangor Daily News:

After a two-month investigation into possible voter fraud by college students and noncitizens, Maine Secretary of State Charlie Summers said Wednesday his evidence showed that none of the students committed fraud and only one noncitizen voted in Maine.

Nevertheless, Summers said his investigation confirmed his belief that Maine’s election system is “fragile and vulnerable,” and he vowed to submit legislation in January to fix some of the problems.

GIven that Summers has already announced his intention, the legislative resolution really isn't needed.

This is good news for Maine voters and taxpayers - who really taught their legislature a lesson with the people's veto of the bill to eliminate same day registration.

Voter ID continues to be a solution looking for a problem.


cross-posted at MainSt/workingamerica.org

Austerity Means Freezing

From the New York Times:

This winter has been especially austere. As part of the drive to cut spending, the Obama administration and Congress have trimmed the energy-assistance program that helps the poor — 65,000 households in Maine alone — to pay their heating bills. Eligibility is harder now, and the average amount given here is $483, down from $804 last year, all at a time when the price of oil has risen more than 40 cents in a year, to $3.71 a gallon.

and

As a result, Community Concepts, a community-action program serving western Maine, receives dozens of calls a day from people seeking warmth. But Dana Stevens, its director of energy and housing, says that he has distributed so much of the money reserved for emergencies that he fears running out. This means that sometimes the agency’s hot line purposely goes unanswered.

So Mainers try to make do. They warm up in idling cars, then dash inside and dive under the covers. They pour a few gallons of kerosene into their oil tank and hope it lasts.

In cold climates, people with outside oil tanks burn kerosene, because regular heating oil turns into a gel when it freezes, and clogs up the pipes. Kerosene doesn't freeze. It's also even more expensive than regular heating oil.

For older Mainers who live in drafty houses, that $483 isn't going to go very far. It's not even enough to fill up the tank once. A standard oil tank holds 275 gallons. Right now in Maine the cost of oil is approximately $4.00 a gallon.

From the Huffington Post:

How the cuts affect low income households varies by state. In Vermont, the effect will be minimal: State lawmakers are dipping into reserves to make up the shortfall from Washington's cuts.

No such luck in Maine, which saw its allotment drop from $56 million to $38.5 million. Last year 64,000 Maine households received LIHEAP assistance, with an average benefit of $804. The quasi-state agency that manages LIHEAP will make sure no fewer people receive assistance, partially by shifting funds and partially by slashing the average benefit to $483.

John and Joan McAdams, a Maine couple in their 70's, are doing this:

"At night we leave it down to 50 and during the day right now we run it at 60 degrees," he said. "This is ludicrous. The wealthy can handle it. We haven't got any money. I go to the food bank. All I get is outdated cans and a lot of spaghetti. There's a rich versus poor situation in this country. It's bad."

He's right. This is bad. This is the end result of the austerity we heard mentioned so proudly: older people freezing in their homes in what is considered the wealthiest country in the world.


Cross-posted at MainSt/workingamerica.org

True Confession: When I read the first story, I sat at my computer and cried.

Small Government Theocracy

The NH legislative session is in full swing. The total number of bills filed in the NH House for 2012 is 870. There have been 175 bills withdrawn. At a cost of approximately $1500 for each bill that goes through legislative services, the NH House is costing NH taxpayers $1,305,000. Money well spent? You decide. Go to the website for the NH legislature: www.gencourt.state.nh.us, where you will find all kinds information, including the text of bills, their status, the House and Senate calendars, as well as voting records for legislators.

Please join me in shedding a tear for HB 1580, the bill that would have required quotes from the Magna Carta in new legislation. After making NH a national laughingstock, the bill went down in flames. That may have been the most ridiculous bill (this session) but there are plenty more that are a waste of our tax dollars.

HCR-2 is a resolution declaring that NH supports the Arizona immigration law. I’m sure that makes all the difference in the world to the folks of Arizona, but does it make any sense to the taxpayers of NH? It doesn’t create any jobs. All it does is affirm the bigotry of the majority party, on the taxpayer’s dime.

HB -587, a bill that would allow no-fault divorces only if the parties involved have no minor children. This bill was sponsored by Representatives Hopper, Groen, Comerford, and Ingbretson; all members of the majority party. A party that claims to be the party of small government. The party of less government interference in your life. It’s one of life’s great mysteries that these people can make those claims, all the while filing bills designed to interfere as much as possible in the lives of their constituents.

HB 1147 is a bill to make March 31 of every year a day to remember Teri Schiavo, a woman who had no connection to NH. A woman who was kept alive by government interference, long after her brain was dead. Is this money well spent? Will this create jobs? (Maybe some tacky souvenirs.) The House leadership chose not to allow this bill to be debated, and instead laid it on the table. That’s parliamentary speak for “we’re putting it aside for now, but we can revive it.” Maybe later, when they aren’t embarrassed to be wasting tax dollars on such an exercise in pious vanity.

One of my favorite bills was also deemed inexpedient to legislate. HB 228, was loftily called, “The Whole Woman’s Health Funding Priorities Act.” It’s even more impressive, when one learns that the authors and sponsors of this bill are all men. Representatives: Robert Willette, Lawrence Kappler, John Cebrowski, Jon Richardson, Warren Groen, and David Bates. This is akin to Susan Bruce writing, The Whole Man’s Guide…to anything. These are men who don’t like women, and don’t want them to have any control over their bodies. In fact, this bill would have prohibited NH HHS from contracting with Planned Parenthood (as they have done for over 40 years) to provide services to low income, uninsured women. I don’t know why these guys want women to get breast, uterine, or ovarian cancer, but they sure do seem to want to. You’d think they’d want the incubators to be healthy. We already know that “less government interference” doesn’t apply to the lives of women.

HB 1712 would require the teaching of a Biblical literacy course in grades 9-12. The best part of this bill is the rather grandiose justification:

“The general court finds that New Hampshire Republicans are united by our belief in God, individual liberty, personal responsibility, places of worship, communities, and volunteerism. The general court also finds and recognizes the history of our country, from the Mayflower Compact, Revolutionary War, the Federalist Papers, and other speeches and writings of our Founding Fathers, is rooted in the belief in God and the teachings of the Bible.”

NH Republicans are united by their belief in God, so in the interest of individual liberty, they’re going to force their beliefs on high school kids. There was no fiscal note attached, so the potential cost to cities and towns is unknown. This GOP theocracy bill is currently in committee. No word on when a course in Rastafarian Literacy will be required.

HB 1421- required a vegetarian diet for all inmates in the NH corrections system. No rationale was given, but there were provisions for providing supplements, which leads one to believe that there was some influence from corporate America, perhaps in the guise of Monsanto or Archer Daniels Midland. It would have increased food costs by nearly 5% annually, and so it was deemed inexpedient to legislate.

The same representative, who gave us HB 1421, also filed CACR 24, an amendment to the NH Constitution that would stipulate that no one would be eligible to become a judge until they had reached age 60. No word on what the reasoning behind this was, but again, it was deemed inexpedient to legislate. That’s $3000 right there that Rep. Kingsbury wasted on frivolous legislation. We can’t send him a bill, but the voters of Laconia can rectify this mistake in November.

And finally (for now) there is HR 27, a resolution urging NH lawmakers to declare “brainpower” a state resource. Who says irony is dead?


© sbruce 2012

This was published as an op-ed in the 2-3-12 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper.

"Asset Poor" Households Growing in Number

A new report by the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) shows a major increase in what they call "asset poor" households:

In the United States, 27 percent of all households are “asset poor,” meaning they lack the savings or other assets to cover basic expenses for just three months if a layoff or other emergency
leads to loss of income, according to the 2012 Assets & Opportunity Scorecard, released today by the
Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED). Since the release of the 2009-2010 Assets & Opportunity Scorecard, the number of asset poor families has increased by 21 percent from one in five families to one in
four families. The asset poverty rate is now nearly twice as high as the Census Bureau’s official income
poverty rate of 15.1 percent.

An increase of 21% is certainly significant.

“Growing numbers of families have almost no savings or other assets to see them through if they lose their jobs or face a medical crisis,” said Andrea Levere, president of CFED. “Without savings, few will be able to build a more economically secure future, including buying a home, saving for their children’s college educations or building a retirement nest egg.”

Levere added that the Scorecard findings are “particularly disturbing in the context of precipitous drops in
incomes for many Americans and widening of the wealth gap between the richest and poorest households.”

Last year Business Insider provided us with 15 graphs looking at income inequality and wealth in the US. Graph #5 illustrates the flat wages many of us have experienced since at least 1990.

A look at key findings from the report shows something of crucial importance:

One in five jobs (22 percent) is low wage and nearly half of employers (46 percent) do not offer health insurance. Most workers (55 percent) do not have or participate in retirement plans. These low- quality jobs make it harder for families to both meet their needs today and create a reserve for tomorrow.

As wages continue to stagnate, good paying jobs are replaced with low wage jobs, and the costs of housing, food, transportation, heating oil, and everything else continue to rise, how will people save for the future, when they can't even make ends meet in the present?

And why aren't the presidential candidates talking about this?


cross-posted at MainSt/workingamerica.org

Shakir E-Mails Immortalized

Regular readers and locals will remember this name: Ray Shakir. Ray, a guy who made his money in NY, (at a union job, no less) moved to NH to tell folks here how to spend THEIR money, mostly by not educating kids. He's written obnoxious letters to the editor of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper for years, shooting his mouth off at every opportunity. He went a little too far, in a series of emails where he referred to President Obama as a "jungle alien" and a "n*gger." Shakir's racism went national, thanks to a story in Mother Jones magazine. He's been a little subdued since then. GOP candidates don't come to his house or his parties any more. His letters to the paper are infrequent, and no longer reach the soaring heights of bellicosity he could command.

This is the same sweet guy who sent a letter to the paper after I hit a moose with my car in 2003, and commented that it was too bad I hadn't been killed in the crash.

Ray's email exchange with one local resident has been immortalized forever by xtranormal:

Take Down the Tea Party Ten

The folks at CREDO Action have formed a Super Pac, intended to: Take Down the Tea Party Ten in 2012. The Super Pac has chosen 6 (so far) of the 10 worst offenders from the Tea Party House. The biggest offenders in the areas of : Sexism, racism, science denial, hypocrisy, and of course sheer crazy.

So, what's the point? One of the chosen is our very own NH CD 1 Congressman Frank Guinta. Frank of the "forgotten" $350,000 bank account. Frank who would force a rape victim to incubate the spawn of her rapist. Frank who voted against additional FEMA funding to help our state rebuild after Hurricane Irene devastated parts of the state. Frank whose allegiance is to the Koch Brothers, not the people of District One. Frank who got elected with the help of the Tea Party, but didn't even join their caucus.



The CREDO Super Pac is going to be funded with small donations, and unlike the other Super Pacs, will also be transparent. No secrets about where the money came from. The Super Pac will be used to pay for offices in each of the targeted districts, to pay organizing staff, new media folks - who will roll up their sleeves and get to work on throwing the bums out. CREDO has over 2.5 million activists around the country, waiting to get involved.

This is a campaign to oust. Not a campaign to elect. The folks working for various candidates can take care of that.

So far the rest of the Big Ten list consists of: Joe Walsh, Sean Duffy, Steve King, Chip Cravaack, and Allan West. The remaining 4 of the Big Ten will be chosen soon.

The CREDO Super Pac is planning to put a lot of resources into ousting the odious. As we learned in 2006, committed citizen activists can have a huge impact on an election. We kicked Jeb Bradley to the curb, and voted in Carol Shea Porter. None of that would have been possible without all of the folks who went to Bradley's town hall meetings and asked him pointed questions about Social Security and Medicare. CREDO will be opening an office, hiring staff, organizing volunteers, and engaging the new media. With their help, we'll be saying goodbye to Fraudulent Frank, come November.

Things should start happening in March. I'll keep you posted.

The Desperate Need for Affordable Housing

In July I wrote about folk stampeding for Section 8 housing vouchers in Dallas, when thousands of people showed up, some waiting all night, to get vouchers for subsidized housing. It was a terrible story.

Since then, nothing much has changed, other than the fact that even more people are in need of affordable housing. From The Nation:

In Oakland, California, which opened its waiting list in January, officials expected as many as 100,000 people to apply for 10,000 vouchers. In Atlanta, sixty-two people were injured in 2010 at an East Point shopping center where 30,000 lined up after the local housing authority opened its waiting list for the first time in eight years. Even small communities like Aiken, South Carolina, saw hundreds queuing up in October for a chance at housing aid about as likely as seeing three cherries in a row on a Vegas slot machine.

Another way you can find tangible evidence of the housing affordability crunch is by visiting one of New York City’s exploding number of homeless shelters, where a record 41,000 homeless people bed down each night, including more than 17,000 children. The New York Times recently told the story of one of those children, fourth-grader N-Dia Layne, who travels two and a half hours each day between her Upper Manhattan shelter and her school in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood. In Cleveland, the number of homeless families and kids grew so rapidly this past summer that for the first time shelters were forced to eliminate daytime meals, housing-search assistance and other services in order to move workers to the overnight shifts, according to Brian Davis of the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless.

I had to read those New York numbers a few times. I can't imagine that there are over 17,000 homeless children in NY City and this isn't an issue being discussed in the endless presidential debates?

By nearly any measure, there are fewer and fewer homes affordable to working-class and poor Americans. The federal housing agency’s annual assessment finds that “worst-case housing needs” grew by 42 percent from 2001 to 2009, and nationwide there is a shortfall of nearly 3.5 million housing units for the poorest households. According to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, the share of renter households with the most severe cost burdens—that is, where more than half of income goes to rent and utilities—grew from a fifth to a quarter over the past decade and has doubled in the past half-century. And as household incomes stagnated for most of the past decade and then dropped during the economic crisis, the nation saw its already inadequate stock of cheap rental housing shrink even faster.

It's pretty simple, really. The cost of living is increasingly high, while wages are increasingly low. It's not a recipe for keeping a roof over one's head.

All of the plans to "end homelessness in 10 years," either are, or will be abject failures. The programs were all underfunded, and as the budget for federal housing programs continues to shrink, their failure is guaranteed. In the name of "deficit reduction" these programs are being cut, and cut again - with the goal being to eliminate them all together.

Despite the bleak policy landscape and the worsening affordability crisis, many local advocates and people working on the front lines talk about the renewed energy and hope generated by the nascent Occupy movement and the revived national discourse about income inequality. Donovan talks hopefully about the “other 1 percent”—the homeless and poor—saying that the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the superrich 1 percent is “causing the other 1 percent to agitate, and to show that homeless people are something other than a herded mass. They’re saying, Enough is enough.”

The Occupy movement changed the national discussion when it began last fall. Instead of deficits and debt, we're now hearing about income inequality, joblessness, and a host of other issues that weren't even on the horizon over the summer. It is my hope (as someone living with housing insecurity) that Occupy brings housing to the forefront of our national dialogue.


cross posted at MainSt/workingamerica.org

We Need Jobs That Pay the Bills

We hear a lot of talk about job creation, and bringing jobs back to America. We hear nothing about the kind of jobs we need the most: jobs that provide decent wages. From the Los Angeles Times:

While productivity has grown by more than 80% over the last 30 years, wages have effectively been flat for 80% of Americans. So, although we're making stuff faster and more efficiently, the benefits of that hard work have not trickled into the pockets of the people who do it.

In other words, more work for less pay.

First, companies are coming back to the United States because wages here are dropping, in real terms. At the same time, lower-wage corporate nirvanas such as China are no longer as cheap an alternative as they once were, partly because the sea of people who worked for next to nothing for so long have had enough and are rising up in protest.

The US is becoming the place to outsource low paying jobs to.

Second, most of the jobs coming back are not high-wage, union jobs with full healthcare and pensions. In fact, with concerted efforts by Republican governors in the Midwest to eviscerate union rights, times have never been better for corporate leaders seeking to lower labor costs. With labor costs in the U.S. dropping relative to those in the Third World, the president's offer of tax incentives to other companies that in-source is unnecessary. As Citizens for Tax Justice points out, using a 2007 Bush administration study, corporations based in the United States already have plenty of tax incentive to locate here because "the United States takes a below-average share of corporate income in taxes compared to other developed countries."

and

If you add those people to the people who have full-time work at or just above the minimum wage, at least 1 in 5 Americans — 30 million people — does not have a decent job. Which explains why, according to the Census Bureau, 46 million people — or about 15% of Americans — live in poverty, the highest percentage since 1993.

This is a nasty reality that politicians shy far, far away from, when they talk about jobs. Many of us (I'm one of that 15%) are relying on part time jobs, or low paying jobs that result in us not having enough to live on. This means more people relying on the shrinking safety net, and the kindness of family and friends.

We need the kind of jobs that will rebuild the middle class.



cross-posted at MainSt/workingamerica.org

Mobile Food Pantries Helping Rural Nevada

Food banks in Nevada are trying to reach small communities in rural areas by setting up mobile food pantries. A truck comes in, volunteers unload, and begin to distribute the food. By the time they finish, nothing is left.
From the Las Vegas Sun:

The mobile pantries differ from traditional pantries because they’re scheduled, mass-distribution events that can quickly serve thousands of people, said John Livingston, Three Square’s chief operating officer.

and

As the Sandy Valley operation proved successful, Three Square officials scouted other locations that would benefit based on factors such as access to grocery stores, nutritious food availability and existing agencies’ capacity to feed those in need, Livingston said.


Without having to rely on a fixed location, the trucks can travel to the areas that have the greatest need.

Grace Immanuel sits in ZIP code 89106, where 27 percent of residents may go hungry despite food stamps and other services already provided in the area, according to a Feeding America report using 2010 data. It’s the same situation in neighboring ZIP codes.

Other mobile pantries began in surrounding rural areas known as “food deserts”: Pahrump, Mesquite and, earlier this month, Laughlin, Livingston said. A Caliente location will begin in February, he added.

Given that Nevada consistently has the highest unemployment rates in the US, it's good to see organizations working together to provide assistance to folks in small communities that are often underserved. This is truly a creative solution.


Cross-posted at MainSt/workingamerica.org

Moving to Gilead

The current NH House of Representatives packed so much crazy into the last year, it’s difficult to imagine that there could be more. But there is more, so much more. The NH House is comprised of Free Staters, Teabaggers, and John Birchers, all simmering together in the least appetizing stew one could be served. Throw in a couple of outraged, old fashioned Main St. Republicans, and you’ve captured the essence of the O’Brien lead House.

In 2010, the Republicans campaigned on their perpetual slogan, “NH doesn’t have a revenue problem, NH has a spending problem” and their promise of a laser-like focus on job creation. Voters responded to these craven statements by electing any dimwit (see Harty, Martin) having an “R” next to his or her name. NH has long had a spending problem, but not the one the freebaglicans claim. NH doesn’t spend enough money in some very important areas. Take infrastructure. According to the American Society of Civil engineers: 51% of NH bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, 27% of NH ‘s major roads are in poor or mediocre condition, and there are 106 high hazard dams in NH. (This is only a sampling of NH infrastructure needs.) The “repair and maintain” can gets kicked down the road every 2 years, so that ultimately the state will pay the pound of cure. Or in the case of that bridge from Milton to Lebanon, ME the local businesses will go under while the bridge remains inoperable. Don’t look to the current legislature to actually address an actual need. They’re far too interested in making bold power grabs, eliminating the judiciary, eliminating public education, eliminating voting, eliminating women, and assigning everyone a gun. They realize they have to work fast, because most are unlikely to be reelected, thanks to the national humiliation they’ve brought upon our state.

By my (inexact) count, there are at least 5 bills aimed at gerrymandering districts, 15 anti-education bills, 10 involving elections, 6 anti-voting, 10 anti-union, 10 anti-local control, 10 telling Congress what to do, 11 gun bills, 2 whiny men bills, and at least 10 anti-women bills. There are also plenty of nonsensical bills. More on those next time.

With HB 1659, the forced birth crowd wants women to have a 24 hour waiting period to read incorrect anti-abortion propaganda before going through the LEGAL procedure of abortion. Apparently we wimmin are so dumb, we need men to make our decisions for us. We are not, however, too dumb to serve as involuntary incubators. HB 1660 would eliminate abortions after 20 weeks, and HB 1679 would eliminate partial birth abortions, even though there is no such medical procedure, and third trimester abortions. Third trimester abortions account for about 0.04% of abortions. (That’s four hundredths of one percent) These women have late term abortions for health reasons. Like saving the life of the woman, which doesn’t appear to be a concern of the folks who wrote this bill. Those health reasons are not the business of the people who want to stick their noses into women’s medical privacy. What about freedom and liberty, and no gummint interference in your personal life? Oh, right! That only applies to white, heterosexual men.

HB 1680 would compel HHS to compile and maintain termination of pregnancy statistics. That, dear readers, means making a list of names, and demonizing the women that had a legal medical procedure somewhere down the line. Get out your red capes, girls. We’re moving to Gilead.

The NH House voted this week to defund Planned Parenthood. Public money isn’t used for the legal procedure known as abortion, but that matters naught to the men who want to make decisions for women. Planned Parenthood does, however, do: pap smears, breast exams, STD screenings, and provides low cost birth control to low-income women. What the NH legislature is telling women is this: you have no value. We don’t care if you get cancer. Our only concern is a nebulous potential fetus. So, if you get ovarian cancer, that’s your tough luck, slut. The men who claim to value life above all else don’t place any value on YOUR life, if you’re a woman. Speaker O’Brien has attached an amendment to this that would ban public employee health plans from covering the legal procedure known as abortion. Papa Doc O’Brien knows what’s best for you silly girlies.

Imagine if all this scrutiny were aimed at male genitalia. It’s time to stop boys and men from murdering trillions of potential people every day via the Sin of Onan. Where is the GOP concern for all of that killing? Where is the cry for HHS masturbation statistics? Surely that information needs to be close at hand, along with the names of the multiple offenders. And isn’t it time for these good Republican Christians to be forced to go before a panel to explain why they need a Viagra prescription? It better be for purposes of procreation only, with only a legal spouse, in one of those “between a man and a woman” marriages. Men must come to terms with the fact that their impotence is God’s will, and stop trying to do an end run around God’s plan for them.

Either women are equal human beings, or chattel. If having a functioning uterus makes women property of the state, than it’s time for the state to start picking up the tab for the support and maintenance of their property. In fact, boys, I’d be wary about all those unlicensed guns you’re advocating for. The women just might start fighting back. I only hope I live long enough to see it.


“Women are the only oppressed group in our society that lives in intimate association with their oppressors.” Evelyn Cunningham



© 2012 sbruce
Printed as an op-ed in the January 20, 1012 edition of the Conway Daily Sun newspaper.

Nation's Mayors Exasperated With Congress

The US Conference of Mayors is meeting in Washington, and expressing their disgust with the ongoing spending cuts that leave their cities firmly mired in the ongoing economic crisis.

New York Times:

Only 26 of the nation’s 363 metropolitan areas had recovered their lost jobs by the end of 2011, and only 26 more are projected to recover them by end of this year, according to the report, which was commissioned by the United States Conference of Mayors. It will take at least five years for the 80 hardest-hit areas to recover the jobs they lost, the report forecast.

and

Not only has Congress failed to overcome partisan gridlock to agree on a way to created much-needed jobs by spending more money on infrastructure, mayors said, but even the small sources of federal support that cities rely on — whether the Community Development Block Grants that were devised by Republican administrations in the 1970s or more recent federal programs that help struggling cities pay for more police officers or firefighters — are being scaled back as Washington has made cutting the deficit a priority.

Now, here's a thought:

Mayor James Brainard of Carmel, Ind., a Republican, said that the country must get to a point where it spends less than it collects in revenues, but that it must be done over years, carefully.

“We have to recognize that it can’t be done in one year without throwing us into a huge, much worse depression than we’ve had,” he said. “It needs to be a multiyear plan that doesn’t create terrible hardship.”

The report commissioned by the mayors can be found here.

The opening lines of the introduction:

No one has been hit harder by the Great Recession than the 8.8 million Americans who have lost their jobs during the most significant economic downturn in generations.

Our nation’s mayors are focused on doing everything we can to help the jobless, the underemployed, and those worried about losing their jobs.

That kind of concern is a real contrast to all the unemployed bashing we've seen by members of Congress and the presidential candidates. Let's hope that folks in Washington are paying attention while the mayors are in town.



cross-posted at MainSt/workingamerica.org

Wyoming: Highest Rate of Workplace Fatalities

The gas, oil, and mining industries are booming in Wyoming. A new report shows that workplace fatalities are booming, too. From the New York Times:

A report compiled by an epidemiologist hired by the state and released on Jan. 3, found that Wyoming’s work sites lacked what it called a culture of safety and that proper safety procedures were not followed in the vast majority of cases when someone was killed on the job.

The report also noted that Wyoming had the highest workplace fatality rate in the country for all but one year from 2003 through 2008. In 2010, the last year that data was provided, Wyoming’s estimated occupational death rate was three and a half times the national average, the report said.


Granted, workers know going in that these are dangerous jobs. But this report emphasizes that proper safety procedures were not followed in most cases.

“We have a system where there’s no accountability, where the employer has no incentive to be responsive,” said John Vincent, a former mayor of Riverton, who has represented the families of dead and injured oil and gas workers in his law practice and has worked on the legislative effort. “People are afraid to sue. They won’t report injuries. They’ll just stay at home until they get better.”

The online publication New West Politics also covered this report. The fatality numbers in Wyoming did actually decrease in 2010 (when Montana took first place) but:

“More than half of the 16,000-plus jobs lost in Wyoming were in natural resource development and construction, and these bear the most dangerous occupational risks,” Wyoming state occupational epidemiologist Timothy Ryan told WyoFile in a recent interview.

Ryan fears that when the economy picks up and hiring resumes in the construction, oil, mining, and gas industries, the fatalities will also increase again.

A story from 2011 that illustrates the lack of "a culture of safety" in the workplace:

On January 5, Kyle Rooke, 42, of Drummond, Id., was struck by drilling mud when a standpipe valve failed on a drilling rig south of Pinedale. The drilling mud caught fire, according to the Wyoming Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Rooke died before medical responders arrived at the scene.

A Wyoming OSHA investigation revealed several alleged safety violations. Rooke wasn’t wearing flame-retardant clothing, and had the rig operator — Unit Drilling Co. — conducted a “protective equipment assessment” the company should have realized that flame-retardant clothing was necessary for the job Rooke was performing, according to Wyoming OSHA.

The investigation, according to OSHA officials, also found improperly functioning equipment related to the accident that should have been repaired, replaced or removed. As a result of those and other safety violations on the rig, Wyoming OSHA issued several citations to Unit Drilling Co., totaling $23,250 in fines. The company has until July 13 to contest the citations or agree to pay.

These fines are substantially higher than fines levied in the past.

The four workplace fatalities that Wyoming OSHA investigated in 2010 resulted in a total $9,125 in fines, according to federal OSHA documents. That’s an average $2,281 for violations contributing to the death of a worker.

Not exactly an incentive for the company to change - and a sorry commentary on how worker's lives are valued.

Other steps are being made to improve workplace safety in Wyoming. In June approximately 200 companies within the oil and gas industry formally signed an alliance with Wyoming OSHA. The Wyoming Oil and Gas Industry Safety Alliance (WOGISA) seeks to raise safety awareness, identify best practices and share training resources. Already in the works is a training program for “first-line” supervisors.

All worthy goals, and hopefully this alliance will have a positive impact on the worker safety issue in Wyoming. Of course there's nothing like having a report like this make national news to provide even more of an incentive to change.


A study on workplace safety done at the University of Michigan had some interesting results:

New research by Roland Zullo of the Institute for Research on Labor, Employment and the Economy shows that right-to-work laws result in the underfunding of safety training and accident-prevention activities.

Wyoming is a right-to-work-state.

Although he found no direct association between right-to-work laws and industry and occupation fatalities Zullo’s findings suggest that the estimated effect union density has on reducing worker deaths does depend on state right-to-work laws. In states without such laws, a 1 percent increase in union density correlates with a 0.35 percent decline in the ratio of industry fatalities and a 0.58 percent drop in the occupation fatality ratio.

“Unions appear to have a positive role in reducing construction industry and occupation fatalities, but only in states without right-to-work laws,” he said.

RTW may not be to blame for the high rate of worker fatalities in Wyoming, but it certainly hasn't helped. Zullo's research should be taken into consideration by any state considering a RTW law.



cross-posted at MainSt/workingamerica.org

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Has Vigorous Agenda

Last month the Senate used the filibuster to prevent President Obama's nomination to direct the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. As a result, the president installed Cordray as director by using executive power to make a recess appointment.

From the New York Times:

The new director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau outlined a vigorous oversight and enforcement agenda on Thursday, saying that financial companies that take unfair advantage of consumers would face “real consequences.”

The director, Richard Cordray, who was appointed to the post on Wednesday by President Obama, encouraged consumers to contact the agency through its Web site with complaints about banks, payday lenders and other financial institutions that they think have sold deceptive products or engaged in abusive behavior.

Finally! At last, consumers will have a place to go to make complaints about shady mortgage companies, banks, title loan companies, and payday lenders. This is great news for the bottom 99%.

The agency’s most immediate focus will be on so-called nonbank financial companies — money transfer agencies, credit bureaus and private mortgage lenders, for example — which have fallen outside the authority of most regulators, Mr. Cordray said.

That these companies have been unregulated is just not acceptable.

“Many subprime loans during the housing bubble were made by nonbank mortgage brokers,” he added. “Since most of these businesses are not used to any federal oversight, our new supervision program may be a challenge for them. But we must establish clear standards of conduct so that all financial providers play by the rules.”

That's very diplomatically put. What he's saying, of course, is that these companies are going to be held accountable for their actions, which is long overdue. Richard Cordray plans to move forward "promptly and vigorously" and that is good news for all of us.

People who have complaints are urged to contact the new bureau directly at: www.consumerfinance.gov


cross-posted at MainSt/workingamerica.org