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Alpine Helicopter Service has been implicated in dozens of complaints of crop loss and personal injury when pesticides it sprayed allegedly landed on the wrong targets. Now, the state of California is suing the company and taking a stand on pesticide misuse.
Early In the pandemic, OSHA drew scathing criticism for a hands-off approach to a crisis that has claimed the lives of hundreds of essential workers. More recently, the agency began ramping up enforcement. Despite the burst of activity, a FairWarning review shows that inspectors are mostly responding to deaths or hospitalizations, as required by law, rather than flagging unsafe conditions before more workers get infected.
Workers at Maid-Rite Specialty Foods turned to OSHA to correct what they saw as dangerous workplace conditions. What happened next reflects what critics see as OSHA’s business-friendly approach to the virus that has ravaged many workplaces.
Across the United States, workers face wildly varying rules about whether Covid-19 is covered as a workplace injury. More than a dozen states have changed their laws or rules since the pandemic—often forcing workers to prove they contracted the virus on the job.
Tipped service workers have often been left out of the nationwide push to raise the minimum wage. But as the pandemic rearranges business models, advocates see potential for long-awaited change.
Michele Gran used to warn her sons to be careful in the world. Then her worst nightmare came true.
Run-ins with job safety regulators are routine for Dollar Tree, the huge discount retail chain. A FairWarning investigation found that more than 150 company stores have been cited for safety violations since December 2015, despite a settlement with OSHA in which Dollar Tree agreed to pay $825,000 in penalties and clean up its act.
Despite aggressive enforcement of wage laws by the California Labor Commissioner's office, some workers wait years for back pay, if they get any at all.
An 81-year-old labor law allows certain companies to pay disabled workers less than minimum wage. Some make pennies an hour.
The firm, PriorityWorkforce, has run afoul of safety regulators, and now it's trying to find jobs for the homeless.
Over the years, hundreds of workers have died from heat stress in fields and at construction sites. Citing the warming climate, groups have renewed calls for a federal heat standard.
887 workers were killed in falls in 2017, the highest number reported by the government in nearly 30 years. Preventing workers from falling off roofs, scaffolds, ladders and other elevated surfaces should be simple. Public information about fall hazards is widely available, and so is equipment and training. Safety regulations are effective when followed. Yet the deaths continue to mount.
Agency won't require employers to routinely report detailed internal records of worker injuries or illnesses.
For years, truck drivers hauling billions in consumer goods have complained about rampant wage law violations by the trucking firms that hire them. But even when truckers’ claims have been upheld by state authorities, they have often found it nearly impossible to collect.
A fateful decision by Congress more than 40 years ago gives the sites unique immunity from safety oversight, even as hundreds of employees have been killed or seriously injured.
