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	December 23, 2003

NOW THAT'S JOURNALISM The New York Times has just run the third and final part of its investigation into workplace safety, entitled When Workers Die. The series, written by a team led by David Barstow, is long and substantial enough to comprise a small book (and hopefully will be made into one, which is certain to be a best-seller). It reveals one of the darkest sides of corporatism -- when business and government work together to cover up criminal negligence against workers, and with the help of armies of lawyers, shield each other from litigation arising from it. It's a damning protrait of OSHA, the federal agency that is supposed to protect workers but which instead effectively protects negligent and heartless employers. By contrast, it shows how California leads the way in safeguarding basic workers' rights. Please read the whole series: 1. A Trench Caves In; a Young Worker is dead. Is It a Crime? 2. US Rarely Seeks Charges for Deaths in Workplace 3. California Leads in Making Employer Pay for Job Deaths In case the thought of reading a small book on such a depressing subject during Christmas week makes you groan, consider that about 170,000 Americans have died in the past two decades from workplace injuries. Here's a short teaser to motivate you: Every one of their deaths was a potential crime. Workers decapitated on assembly lines, shredded in machinery, burned beyond recognition, electrocuted, buried alive — all of them killed, investigators concluded, because their employers willfully violated workplace safety laws. These deaths represent the very worst in the American workplace, acts of intentional wrongdoing or plain indifference. They were not accidents. They happened because a boss removed a safety device to speed up production, or because a company ignored explicit safety warnings, or because a worker was denied proper protective gear. And for years, in news releases and Congressional testimony, senior officials at the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration have described these cases as intolerable outrages, "horror stories" that demanded the agency's strongest response. They have repeatedly pledged to press wherever possible for criminal charges against those responsible. These promises have not been kept. 12:38:09 PM  trackback []  comment []

MAYBE ONE A few years ago Bill McKibben (better known for his pessimistic book The End of Nature and his anti-genetic-engineering book Enough) wrote a book called Maybe One, explaining his reasons for getting a vasectomy and deciding that one child in today's world is enough. The book was a critical success but a commercial failure, and is out of print, though you can still buy new copies through Amazon. More an apologetic and qualified plea than a prescription for change, the book argues that changes to human lifestyle alone are not enough to curtail ecological disaster in the next century, that even by the most optimistic current forecasts human population will peak at catastrophic numbers, and that voluntarily reducing one's family size in the West has a vastly greater impact than a similar family-size reduction in developing countries where ecological footprint per person is much less. McKibben is strongly opposed to coercive fertility reduction programs like China's, and to attempts to make people who opt for larger families feel guilty. He candidly admits the erroneous predictions of  'population bomb' Malthusians. He dispels the myths that 'only children' are lonely, deprived or anti-social, but acknowledges that life for 'singletons' is in some ways more challenging than life with siblings. He argues that setting limits on immigration (though they need not be severe) can also help to reduce the impact of an exploding population. He explains why getting people to reduce their per-capita consumption is so much more difficult than getting them to reduce their family size (though both are necessary, he argues).  He discusses the reasons for people's reluctance to adopt instead of having a second child themselves. He acknowledges that smaller family sizes will soon put a new burden on healthy economies as the baby boom reaches retirement, and that even smaller family sizes will prolong that period of extra burden. And then he lays out his proposition in a single sentence, and asks us to think and talk carefully and frequently about it: No decision any of us makes will have more effect on the world (and on our lives) than whether to bear another child. That's it. If you want to hear more about why he belives that discussion and education on this one proposition is so important to the future of the world, E: The Environmental Magazine has a lengthy online interview with McKibben. 11:09:03 AM  trackback []  comment []

© Copyright 2004 Dave Pollard. Last update: 19/02/2004; 3:00:02 PM.