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Agency That Investigates Plant Explosions "Grossly Mismanaged"

by bukaroso Posted on April 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by the Center for Public Integrity.

Editor’s note, April 18: An explosion Wednesday at a fertilizer plant north of Waco, Texas, killed between five and 15 people, authorities say, and injured more than 160. The US Chemical Safety Board, an independent agency that investigates chemical accidents and issues safety recommendations, says it expects a “large investigative team” to arrive at the scene this afternoon. As the Center for Public Integrity reported Wednesday, the board has been criticized for failing to complete investigations in a timely manner.

On April 2, 2010, an explosion at the Tesoro Corp. oil refinery in Anacortes, Washington, killed five workers instantly and severely burned two others, who succumbed to their wounds.

Eighteen days later, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and unleashing a massive oil spill.

In both cases, the US Chemical Safety Board—an independent agency modeled after the National Transportation Safety Board—launched investigations. Like the NTSB, the Chemical Safety Board is supposed to follow such probes with recommendations aimed at preventing similar tragedies.

Yet three years after Tesoro and Deepwater Horizon, both inquiries remain open—exemplars of a chemical board under attack for what critics call its sluggish investigative pace and short attention span. A former board member calls the agency “grossly mismanaged.”

The number of board accident reports, case studies, and safety bulletins has fallen precipitously since 2006, an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity found. Thirteen board investigations—one more than five years old—are incomplete.

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Before the Great Recession, There Was the Long Recession

by testdonekAQW Posted on April 9, 2013

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

If you had to date the Great Recession, you might say it started in September 2008 when Lehman Brothers vaporized over a weekend and a massive mortgage-based Ponzi scheme began to go down. By 2008, however, the majority of American workers had already endured a 40-year decline in wages, security, and hope—a Long Recession of their own.

In the 1960s, I met a young man about to be discharged from the Army and then, by happenstance, caught up with him again in each of the next two decades. Though he died two months before the Lehman Brothers collapse, those brief encounters taught me how the Long Recession led directly to our Great Recession.

In the late 1960s, I was working at an antiwar coffee house near an army base from which soldiers shipped out to Vietnam. One gangly young man, recently back from “the Nam,” was particularly handy and would fix our record player or make our old mimeograph machine run more smoothly. He rarely spoke about the war, except to say that his company had stayed stoned the whole time. “Our motto,” he once told me, “was ‘let’s not and say we did.'” Duane had no intention of becoming a professional Vietnam vet like John Kerry when discharged. His plan was to return home to Cleveland and make up for time missed in the civilian counterculture of that era.

I often sat with him during my breaks, enjoying his warmth and his self-aware sense of humor. But thousands of GIs passed through the coffee house and, to be honest, I didn’t really notice when he left.

In the early 1970s, General Motors set up the fastest auto assembly line in the world in Lordstown, Ohio, and staffed it with workers whose average age was 24. GM’s management hoped that such healthy, inexperienced workers could handle 101 cars an hour without balking the way more established autoworkers might. What GM got instead of balkiness was a series of slowdowns and snafus that management labeled systematic “sabotage” until they realized that the word hurt car sales.

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Drivers: Uber Is Skimming Our Tips

by rakil23 Posted on March 25, 2013

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Hailing a taxi in San Francisco used to be about as easy as panning for gold, but that was before the advent of Uber, the San-Francisco-based tech company that’s shaking up the taxi and town-car businesses in major cities. Tapping a button on my iPhone’s Uber app last Thursday produced a Yellow Cab at my downtown office in less than two minutes. “It is the best thing, my friend!” my beaming driver, Solomon Alemayhu, said of the GPS-based cab-hailing service. He likes the convenience factor so much, in fact, that he’s willing to overlook allegations that Uber is improperly skimming from its drivers’ tips.

According to the company website, Uber’s smartphone-based payment system automatically adds to the rider’s tab a $1 booking fee plus a 20 percent gratuity “for the driver.” But as Alemaythu and I drove through Chinatown, he told me that half of that gratuity actually goes to Uber. If that’s true—and Uber insists that it is not—then the company would be misleading consumers and breaking the law in some cities.

In Boston, for instance, Uber faces a class-action lawsuit over the tip-skimming allegation. Filed in late December on behalf of taxi driver David Lavitman, it accuses Uber of violating a state law stipulating that “no employer or other person” may take any portion of a worker’s gratuity. The lawsuit refers to a company document that explains how Uber and the driver divide the earnings: “We will automatically deposit the metered fare + 10% tip to your bank account each week,” it says. It cites the following example of how Uber would handle a $10 fare:

Uber Boston general manager Mike Pao says the document was just a promotional handout and doesn’t reflect Uber’s actual partnership agreement with drivers. “Since we launched here in Boston, the agreement with taxi driver partners has been that 10 percent of the metered fare goes to Uber as a marketing fee,” he insists. “Uber does not touch the tip.”

When I asked Pao for a copy of Uber’s partnership agreement, he referred me to an Uber “terms and conditions” page that lacks specific details about how Uber and drivers share profits. I repeated my request to Uber’s national PR guy, Kenneth Baer, but only received another statement from Pao: “Uber takes 10% of the metered fare as commission, plus the rider’s $1 booking fee, and all drivers are told this during the on-boarding process.”

The next day, Uber’s explanation of its tips policy seemed to have changed again. “We don’t take our cut from the fare or the tip,” Uber’s head of policy, Corey Owens, told me when I ran into him outside Uber’s headquarters. “What happens is that the driver pays Uber a commission based on the services rendered.” He added that the commission amount varies widely depending on city and partner company and refused to cite any specific numbers.

Uber is just “backtracking off of what was very clearly the arrangement between it and the drivers from the beginning,” contends Lavitman’s attorney, Hillary Schwab.

To some drivers, the wording of the deal may not matter so much—the company’s “commission” would be the same whether it’s half of a 20 percent gratuity or a 10 percent surcharge on the fare. The distinction may matter more to passengers, however. In October, Uber rider Caren Ehret filed a class-action lawsuit in Chicago arguing that its practice of snapping up a portion of the “gratuity” charge had defrauded her and other passengers by making the “metered fare” appear misleadingly low. “She has a right for her gratuity to be remitted to the driver,” contends Ehret’s attorney, Hall Adams III.

These skirmishes highlight the types of challenges faced by startups aiming to buck an established industry with smartphone-based transportation apps. The San Francisco ride-sharing services Lyft and SideCar rely on drivers who lack taxi medallions; they bypass the regulated market by asking riders for “voluntary donations” in lieu of fares. Uber also features town-car services called Uber Black and Uberx (a lower-cost version that utilizes hybrids)—and it’s planning to enter the ride-sharing market too. All of these services appeal to consumers because they’re cheap, convenient, and allow people to rate their drivers, adding a layer of accountability to an industry with notoriously bad customer service.

Yet Uber’s honeymoon with its hometown may be coming to an end. With increasing competition, it recently cut fares in San Francisco by 10 percent. Late last year, the California Public Utilities Commission threatened Uber with $20,000 fine for allegedly ignoring insurance regulations, then began drafting a new set of ride sharing rules that could give Uber the squeeze.

This past November, two long-time San Francisco cabbies filed a class-action lawsuit against Uber claiming that it breaks the law by dispatching limos and town cars that are not licensed as taxis. “Simply stated, Uber’s ‘partner’ drivers, who are operating without restriction, are taking passengers, and thus income, away from legally sanctioned taxicab drivers who are literally playing by the rules,” the suit says.

“My biggest beef with these guys is that this app is allowing them to break the law, and the Pubic Utilities Commission is allowing them to get away with it, because they have $50-million venture capitalists as backers,” says Barry Korengold, the president of the San Francisco Cab Drivers Association. “The cab drivers don’t have that kind of money to hire lawyers to fight this.”

Uber’s defenders write off the complaints as sour grapes from a monopolistic industry that loathes competition and accountability. But the grumbling is growing among Uber’s own partners; in recent weeks, dozens of Uber Black drivers have picketed the company’s San Francisco headquarters over what they consider unfair labor practices. A banner held up last Friday read, “Stop stealing our tips!”

Alemayhu, my taxi driver last Thursday, was trying to keep a positive attitude about the taxi-tech revolution. He said he hoped Yellow Cab’s own taxi-hailing app could eventually defeat Uber at its own game. “They can beat them on price, easy!” he said, snapping his fingers. “They just have to change their system.”

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Drivers: Uber Is Skimming Our Tips

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It’s too hot and muggy to work this century

by kx93z6g Posted on February 25, 2013

It’s too hot and muggy to work this century

By John Upton

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It’s getting too hot to get any work done.

Think back to summer. No, no, don’t think about the good times. Instead, try to remember what it was like when it was too stinkin’ hot to get any work done.

Humans don’t work so well when it’s stinking hot. And that means that as the globe warms around us, we’re doing less work. How much less? According to results of a study published Sunday in Nature Climate Change, humanity’s summertime productivity has already fallen 10 percent since before the Industrial Revolution. And it’s going to get worse.

Using middle-of-the-road future temperature and humidity projections, experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated that our productivity during the hottest months could drop by an additional 10 percentage points by 2050. More extreme warming would lead to more extreme impacts.

From Reuters:

A more extreme scenario of future global warming, which estimated a temperature rise of 10.8 degrees F (6 degrees C), would make it difficult to work in the hottest months in many parts of the world, [lead author John Dunne of NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton] said at a telephone briefing.

Labor capacity would be all but eliminated in the lower Mississippi Valley and most of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains would be exposed to heat stress “beyond anything experienced in the world today,” he said.

Under this scenario, heat stress in New York City would exceed that of present-day Bahrain, while in Bahrain, the heat and humidity could cause hyperthermia — potentially dangerous overheating — even in sleeping people who were not working at all.

All of which points to one thing: Less work, more party!

Right?

Oh. The hyperthermia thing.

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Work Less, Save the Planet

by pitery Posted on February 5, 2013

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Here’s a way to cut carbon emissions that is so easy, it actually makes you do less work: cutting back on your work hours. A new study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research concludes that if we all worked fewer hours, we could cut future global warming by as much as 22 percent by 2100.

“The calculation is simple: fewer work hours means less carbon emissions, which means less global warming,” says economist and paper author David Rosnick. His research found that dialing back the amount of time the average person works by 0.5 percent per year would mean a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. If you work 40 hours a week, that would mean shaving about 12 minutes off the average work week per year. Working one minute less per month seems pretty doable. Basically, we’re using a whole lot more of everything when we’re workingâ&#128;&#147;electricity, gasoline, heating, air conditioning, etc. Leisure is requires less greenhouse-gas-producing activity.

Rosnick notes that much of the anticipated future global warming is locked in by the amount of greenhouse gas emissions we’ve already put in the atmosphere. But cutting back on work time could eliminate a quarter to a half of the global warming anticipated from future emissions, he argues. But he acknowledges that this is a more difficult proposition in an economy like the United States that has major inequality between high- and low-income earners. He explains:

In the United States, for example, just under two-thirds of all income gains from 1973â&#128;&#147;2007 went to the top 1 percent of households. In this type of economy, the majority of workers would have to take an absolute reduction in their living standards in order to work less.

Europeans have already gone this route, expanding the amount of time workers get for vacation and holidays. The US, instead, has plugged forward with ever-longer work days. But as Rosnick argues, cutting back on the number of hours we work may increase our productivity in the time we are working.

“Increased productivity need not fuel carbon emissions and climate change,” said CEPR co-director Mark Weisbrot in a statement accompanying the paper. “Increased productivity should allow workers to have more time off to spend with their families, friends, and communities. This is positive for society, and is quantifiably better for the planet as well.”

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Dodge made ‘God made a farmer’ Super Bowl ad, and I made an angry face

by MayeskiLatouf679 Posted on February 4, 2013

Dodge made ‘God made a farmer’ Super Bowl ad, and I made an angry face

By Susie Cagle

Farmers: We like them! So does Dodge, I guess, because there’s not any other clear reason why the American car company would make this ad except to try to associate itself with a trade close to America’s scrappy — and white male — identity.

From Dodge’s portrayal, you’d hardly know that almost a third of farm operators are women, and the population of farm owners of color is growing by full percentage points each year. You’d also hardly know who does most of the work on most of those farms.

American farm worker conditions are likened to “modern slavery,” where a precarious force of 50 to 80 percent undocumented workers picks the vast majority of our produce by hand, earning, on average, about $10,000 each year, though the majority of these workers are also parents supporting children. The numbers vary from state to state, but a large proportion of that workforce that spends each day picking food has to pay for their own sustenance with food stamps. The cheapest Dodge Ram pickup costs more than two years of their salary.

“To the farmer in all of us,” Dodge proclaims at the end of the ad. The farmer in me doesn’t really want a pickup truck, though — she’d much rather pay those field workers 40 percent more, passing along most of the cost to massive corporate distributors such that the average person would only pay $5 more each year for the tiniest (tiniest!) bit of labor ethics and human decency with their supper.

But you know, that’s just my farmer. What does yours think?

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Dodge made ‘God made a farmer’ Super Bowl ad, and I made an angry face

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Are City Orchestras a Dying Breed?

by MayeskiLatouf679 Posted on February 4, 2013

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Last Friday, for the first time in months, the Minnesota Orchestra was back together again. Conductor Osmo Vänskä, a former principal clarinet who attends rehearsals in t-shirts and sometimes a Czech soccer jersey, his body swinging around vigorously from the knees, led his musicians in a rousing performance of Sibelius’s 2nd and 5th symphonies. Vänskä is possibly the best conductor in the world when it comes to Sibelius. Alex Ross, a critic for the New Yorker, has called him a “genius” in that realm, and if the orchestra’s Grammy nomination is any indication, the recording industry seems to agree.

Sibelius, the late Finnish composer, described his Symphony No. 2 as “a struggle between death and salvation.” It starts off tepid and a little sweet, descends into turmoil, and then the horns carry out a proud resolution. The struggle element (though not the resolution) is fitting, given the orchestra’s situation. After the concert, the musicians parted ways in the bitter Minnesota cold to return to an equally bitter lockout that began in October, a labor dispute complicated by the orchestra’s dwindling endowment and the very troubling question of whether it manipulated its books to show a $6 million deficit as an excuse to give its players a 30 percent pay cut. Of late, the musicians have been performing each concert as though it’s their lastâ&#128;&#148;maybe because they feel it might be.

The Minnesota Orchestra is far from alone: Symphonies in Detroit, Indianapolis, Atlanta, Pittsburg, and Chicago have all experienced strikes and/or lockouts over the past two years,and those in many smaller cities, including Miami, Honolulu, and Albuquerque, have folded altogether. In the spring of 2011, the Philadelphia Orchestra became the nation’s first major orchestra to file for chapter 11 bankruptcyâ&#128;&#148;it emerged from restructuring last July with 10 fewer musicians, and a 15 percent pay cut for the remaining players.

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Walmart Workers Get Organized—Just Don’t Say the U-Word

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on February 4, 2013

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At first, William Fletcher, a soul-patched, wisecracking 24-year-old who works in the electronics department at the Walmart in Duarte, California, couldn’t believe what the stranger with the clipboard standing outside his front door was telling him. The guy was describing a new group called Organization United for Respect at Walmart, which was recruiting employees like Fletcher to demand higher wages, better benefits, and less-punishing work schedules. Fletcher liked what he heard, but was skeptical. He’d recently settled a bitter dispute with management over a knee injury. “Frankly, I was convinced it was Walmart sending someone over to trick me into signing something to get me fired,” he says.

He told the guy he wasn’t interested, but another organizer came knocking the next day. This OUR Walmart thing must be real, Fletcher thought. He signed up but didn’t dare tell anyone, and for months the fear of being found out gnawed at him. And with good reason: Walmart strongly discourages the 1.4 million “associates” at its 4,601 US stores from organizing. The company has been known to shutter whole departments and even entire stores where unions make inroads. The result: The average associate earns $8.81 an hour, and many rely on food stamps and Medicaid.

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North Dakota’s oil boom strains healthcare system

by trasze2aja Posted on January 28, 2013

North Dakota’s oil boom strains healthcare system

By Philip Bump

Reuters / Jim UrquhartOil industry worker Bobby Freestone enjoys a day off at a so-called man camp outside Watford, N.D.

The New York Times continues its excellent series on the ramifications of North Dakota’s fracking boom with a look at the state’s overstressed, insufficient healthcare system. (Previously: the state’s gender imbalance.)

The furious pace of oil exploration that has made North Dakota one of the healthiest economies in the country has had the opposite effect on the region’s health care providers. Swamped by uninsured laborers flocking to dangerous jobs, medical facilities in the area are sinking under skyrocketing debt, a flood of gruesome injuries and bloated business costs from the inflated economy. …

Over all, ambulance calls in [one western area of the state] increased by about 59 percent from 2006 to 2011, according to Thomas R. Nehring, the director of emergency medical services for the North Dakota Health Department. The number of traumatic injuries reported in the oil patch increased 200 percent from 2007 through the first half of last year, he said.

The 12 medical facilities in western North Dakota saw their combined debt rise by 46 percent over the course of the 2011 and 2012 fiscal years, according to Darrold Bertsch, the president of the state’s Rural Health Association.

The rate of injury shouldn’t come as a surprise. In 2011, Bureau of Labor Statistics data indicated [PDF] that workers in mining and oil and gas extraction had an on-the-job fatality rate of 71.6 deaths per 100,000 workers. While lower than rates for fishermen and loggers, it’s far higher than other theoretically dangerous occupations. The Atlantic breaks the data down further, if you’re interested.

But back to North Dakota. The problem with healthcare access and funding doesn’t start at the hospital walls.

Public utility numbers suggest that the population of Watford City has more than quadrupled to 6,500 over the past two years, [McKenzie County Hospital Chief Executive Daniel] Kelly said. In nearby Williston, considered the heart of the oil boom, the population, including temporary workers, has swelled to 25,000 to 33,000 from fewer than 15,000 in 2010, according to a study by North Dakota State University.

The huge population growth has produced new communities virtually overnight, creating logistical problems that affect the quality of medical care.

After a recent emergency call, Kelly Weathers, who has worked as a paramedic in the region for nearly 25 years, drove in circles with his team for about 15 minutes, searching for the address where they had been sent to treat a man who had hurt his back falling off a piece of equipment. But they could not find the street because a sign had not yet been erected. Eventually, a colleague of the injured man met the ambulance at the highway and escorted them to the site.

North Dakota is the country’s fastest-growing state. It’s growing far faster than its infrastructure can keep up: Streets are built and populated before they can even be labeled. There’s little evidence that the primary beneficiaries of the boom — the oil companies — have any willingness to help bear the financial burden that results. It’s yet another externalized cost from the fossil fuel industry, a burden that it avoids to keep its costs low and profits high.

The state’s governor hopes to get approval for an expenditure of $74 million for a new medical school building at the University of North Dakota and an expansion of a nursing program at a local state college. In September, ExxonMobil made a big investment in the state, too, spending $1.6 billion in cash for a massive expansion of its fracking acreage. $1.6 billion buys you 196,000 acres of frackable land — or 21 new medical school buildings complete with nursing programs.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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GOP Judges’ Ruling Could Blow Up Obama’s Consumer Watchdog

by HartkePoundstone568 Posted on January 25, 2013

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On Friday, a federal appeals court ruled that President Barack Obama’s appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, which regulates and oversees labor disputes, were unconstitutional. The Constitution allows the president to make temporary appointments, called recess appointments, while the Senate is on break—or recess, in DC terms. Obama did make the NRLB appointments while the Senate was on vacation. But Senate Republicans claimed that the Senate was technically still in session over their vacation because they were holding brief, minutes-long meetings over the course of the break. The three judges on the panel—all of whom were appointed by Republican presidents—agreed with the challengers. Now all the decisions Obama’s NLRB appointees made since they joined the board are at risk of being invalidated.

The court’s decision doesn’t just affect labor law: it could also have an impact on the White House’s broader economic agenda. The sweeping ruling throws into question the future of regulatory decisions made by one of the administration’s most aggressive agencies, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Richard Cordray, the CFBP’s director, was appointed at the same time and in the same manner as the three labor board members. That means the appeals court’s ruling could put the enforceability of his decisions in question, too. Since Cordray’s appointment, the CFPB has set rules preventing mortgage lenders from lying to borrowers about rates, fined credit card companies for violating consumer protection laws, and forced debt-relief services to refund illegal fees they charged to their cash strapped clients.

In other words, the Bureau has done what liberals hoped and Republicans feared: Prevented companies from gouging consumers with the kind of unscrupulous business practices that caused a nationwide economic meltdown four years ago. Although Cordray’s appointment is being challenged separately, Friday’s ruling gives companies impacted by the CFPB’s decisions an opening to argue that some of the CFPB’s actions should be invalidated. Cordray has been renominated as the CFPB’s director, but Republicans could easily filibuster him again.

Last January, when Senate Republicans held their brief vacation sessions, there was little pretense that it was anything more than an obstructionist gimmick: Rep. Dianne Black (R-Tenn.) complained that Obama only put forth the names of his appointments “two days before the Senate recessed for the holiday.” That would be the same recess that the Senate—and now the DC Circuit Court—has said technically didn’t happen. Democrats have tried similar vacation meetings, which are called pro-forma sessions, in the past. But as with the filibuster, Republicans have perfected the practice.

Obama only turned to recess appointments because Republican obstructionism was blocking major government agencies from doing their jobs. The NLRB had no power to make decisions absent at least three of the five members of the board, and the CFPB’s regulatory authority was similarly hampered by the absence of a director. As my colleague Kevin Drum noted at the time, this was nothing less than the Republicans nullifying a duly-passed financial regulatory law they didn’t like.

Friday’s ruling takes the sweeping view that recess appointments made during Senate breaks, like vacations, are unconstitutional. The court found that the recess appointment power can only be used during breaks between Senate sessions—and those only happen once a year, usually over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. It also holds that the president can only make recess appointments for positions that become open during a recess—as opposed to ones that already were open. The court’s position would invalidate the vast majority of recess appointments made by Republican and Democratic presidents over the course of the last century, including that of John Bolton, George W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations.

“That is really a radical position to take,” says Caroline Fredrickson, president of the liberal American Constitution Society. “A president could be prevented from having any of his nominees confirmed.” Fredrickson says she expects the administration to ask the Supreme Court to take up the case as soon as possible.

Here’s the best part: If the decision holds, then Senate Republicans just acquired even more power to block presidential appointments than they already had. Good thing the Democrats decided to cave almost entirely on filibuster reform just a day earlier.

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