One worker died and another was injured in a Massachusetts Transportation Department facility in Northampton after an accident that occurred on April 19.

According to reports, three workers from Trico Welding of Beacon Falls, Connecticut were performing some sort of undetermined task on two modular office units when they somehow became pinned between them and were trapped. One worker was apparently able to escape with no injury.  Another worker was freed by emergency personnel when they brought in a crane to help them move the trailers. That worker was taken to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries. Unfortunately, a third worker was killed.

The modular offices, which are 50 feet long and about 10 feet wide, were being used as temporary offices while renovations were being performed on the main building. The trailers were located just behind the main building on the property.

Both state and local police are on site investigating the accident, as is the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

On Wednesday night, April 17, a huge explosion leveled a fertilizer plant in the small town of West, Texas, resulting in the deaths of 13 people (so far) and injuring as many as 200 others. It hasn’t yet been determined how many of the dead and injured were workers, or exactly what caused the explosion. It started with a smaller fire at the plant, which was being put out by local volunteer firefighters when the heat got to two huge 12,000 gallon tanks of ammonia, causing them to explode.

The tragedy of this explosion has brought to light several problems with state and federal government oversight systems. According to a number of reports, the fertilizer plant was apparently able to place two huge tanks of ammonia into a residential area, with a school, a nursing home and a hospital less than 1,500 feet away, without anyone noticing.

The plant wasn’t cited by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for failing to obtain or to qualify for a permit until June 2006, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) apparently didn’t notice until Sept. 2006, when someone complained about the strong smell of ammonia coming from the plant. The EPA West Fertilizer  $2,300 for failing to have in place a risk management assessment that met federal standards. When they did submit their risk management plan to the EPA, the company claimed there was no risk of fire at the plant, and that the worst case scenario would be a “10-minute release of ammonia gas that would kill or injure no one.”

The benign neglect that other government agencies showed with regard to this plant apparently stretches to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), as well. The last time OSHA paid the plant a visit was in Feb. 1985.  Back then, OSHA inspectors issued the company a $30 fine for storage of anhydrous ammonia. They also cited the company for failing to follow respiratory protection standards, although they didn’t fine the company for those.

Now, 28 years later, they’ve finally decided to do a follow up. OSHA has sent inspectors to the explosion site to determine if there were workplace health and  safety violations. Over the past 30 years, the ratio of OSHA inspectors to workers has dropped significantly, to the point that they have 2,200 inspectors total for the country’s 8 million workplaces and 130 million workers.

If you think the amount of time you’ve been at your job protects you if you choose to be unsafe at work, a recent arbitration case in Ontario should put that notion to rest.

The worker in question had worked 37 years for a lead recycler. Lead recyclers have very strict safety rules to follow as employers, according to the Ontario Occupational Health and Safety Act, including requiring the use of respirators and to monitor all workers for lead exposure.

According to the mediator, the employee had been written up seven times over the last year of his employment, most for safety violations. At the time the employer had decided to let their long-time worker go, they had to write him up twice in two days. The first time, the worker had chosen to work in the plant without a hard hat, safety glasses and mask. The very next day, he was caught working in the plant without a  respirator, and he wasn’t clean shaven for an effective mask seal. These two incidents came less than a month after the worker had been given a written warning and counselling for much the same type of health and safety violations, and just over four months after he had served a 25-day suspension for repeated violations over a six week period.

The arbitrator cited the fact that the worker had not “fully acknowledge(d) or accept(ed) responsibility for his misconduct on either April 30 or May 1, 2012. The company has reasonably concluded that its efforts to rehabilitate the grievor have been fruitless, and that it can no longer tolerate his presence in the workplace.”

In his decision, the arbitrator noted that the worker’s continuing safety violations, and the lack of a meaningful apology, are more meaningful than his many years of service. He noted that “workplace health and safety is a serious matter. … arbitrators (must) take the mutual responsibility of employers, unions, and employees to ensure workplace health and safety is very seriously . . . Lengthy service by itself has less mitigation currency in health and safety misconduct cases than it has in other kinds of cases.”

No matter how long you’ve worked at your job, safety is always an important concern.

After a years-long fight, last month the Nova Scotia legislature tabled new legislation that would allow the province to reimburse pension benefits that had been denied to 108 widows whose husbands had been killed on the job, because they remarried at the wrong time.

According to the newly amended Widows Pension Act, the women are now entitled to full retroactive widows’ benefits, which means they will get about $110,000 each. The law had been changed in 1999 so that remarried women could continue to receive survivors’ benefits retroactive to the date when they remarried, but there was just one problem. Because of the way the law was written, for women who remarried before 1985, those benefits were only retroactive to 1999.

The latest change was spearheaded by Betty Baumann of Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. Her first husband had been killed in a rock fall at a Devco coal mine in Cape Breton back in 1960.

According to the Nova Scotia provincial government, most of the money to go to the widows will come from the Workers’ Compensation Board’s accident fund, which covers workers injured on the job, while those employers who are self-insured, such as the government, will have to foot their own portion of the bill.

A Saskatchewan justice has smacked two large insurance companies with the largest punitive damages award in Canada for what the court referred to as “abhorrent” treatment of an injured worker.

Zurich Life Insurance Co. was ordered to pay $3 million for punitive damages and $300,000 in aggravated damages while AIG will have to pay $1.5 million in punitive damages, and $150,000 in aggravated damages for their respective roles in which they were found to have refused to pay workers’ compensation payments to a 62-year-old “sought-after, highly-trained” welder, Luciano Branco. At the same time the insurance companies were hit, charges against Branco’s employer, mine owner Cameco Corp., were dismissed.

Back in Dec. 1999, while Branco was working as a welder at a Cameco Corp. gold mine, he dropped a steel plate on his foot. He finished his shift, and covered his foot in snow to relieve the pain.  He neither reported the injury nor stopped working, even when he re-injured the same foot in February 2000. Finally, in June 2000, the injury was reported to the company.

After surgery failed to repair the damage to the foot, AIG received two reports informing them that Branco was permanently disabled, including one from a doctor AIG itself had referred. AIG made a settlement offer in July 2001 of $22,500, which Branco rejected. Following that, Branco then saw a specialist, who confirmed the disability, although AIG continued to withhold payments, and even cut them off twice without explanation.

Though according to his disability report, he was unable to work on ground that wasn’t even and level, AIG tried to rehabilitate him gardener at a facility that was three hours from his home, and they threatened to cut off his benefits if he balked at taking the job, or find job re-training on his own.  Even though he reported to Saskatchewan WCB for physical rehabilitation and job retraining, AIG  cut off payments to Branco for good in 2004, and received no payments until days before the trial started in August 2012, when they suddenly paid him all the money they owed him.

This isn’t the first time AIG has done this sort of thing. In May 2003, they were accused of much the same thing at the same gold mine, and by the same adjuster on the same policy, and were forced to pay $60,000 in punitive damages. were awarded against the company in a case that involved the same gold mine, the same policy and the same adjuster.

In the court’s ruling, the Justice said, “The cruel and malicious acts of AIG and Zurich combined with the previously ignored award of punitive damages against AIG is evidence of how calculated and abhorrent the actions of AIG were in dealing with Branco. … The court is cognizant of the fact that a punitive damages award of $3 million may not be particularly significant to the financial bottom line of a successful worldwide insurance company. It is hoped that this award will gain the attention of the insurance industry. The industry must recognize the destruction and devastation that their actions cause in failing to honour their contractual policy commitments to the individuals insured.”

One worker died and another was injured in a Massachusetts Transportation Department facility in Northampton after an accident that occurred on April 19.

According to reports, three workers from Trico Welding of Beacon Falls, Connecticut were performing some sort of undetermined task on two modular office units when they somehow became pinned between them and were trapped. One worker was apparently able to escape with no injury.  Another worker was freed by emergency personnel when they brought in a crane to help them move the trailers. That worker was taken to the hospital with non-life threatening injuries. Unfortunately, a third worker was killed.

The modular offices, which are 50 feet long and about 10 feet wide, were being used as temporary offices while renovations were being performed on the main building. The trailers were located just behind the main building on the property.

Both state and local police are on site investigating the accident, as is the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

(Adrees Latif/Reuters)

On Wednesday night, April 17, a huge explosion leveled a fertilizer plant in the small town of West, Texas, resulting in the deaths of 13 people (so far) and injuring as many as 200 others. It hasn’t yet been determined how many of the dead and injured were workers, or exactly what caused the explosion. It started with a smaller fire at the plant, which was being put out by local volunteer firefighters when the heat got to two huge 12,000 gallon tanks of ammonia, causing them to explode.

The tragedy of this explosion has brought to light several problems with state and federal government oversight systems. According to a number of reports, the fertilizer plant was apparently able to place two huge tanks of ammonia into a residential area, with a school, a nursing home and a hospital less than 1,500 feet away, without anyone noticing.

The plant wasn’t cited by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for failing to obtain or to qualify for a permit until June 2006, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) apparently didn’t notice until Sept. 2006, when someone complained about the strong smell of ammonia coming from the plant. The EPA West Fertilizer  $2,300 for failing to have in place a risk management assessment that met federal standards. When they did submit their risk management plan to the EPA, the company claimed there was no risk of fire at the plant, and that the worst case scenario would be a “10-minute release of ammonia gas that would kill or injure no one.”

The benign neglect that other government agencies showed with regard to this plant apparently stretches to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), as well. The last time OSHA paid the plant a visit was in Feb. 1985.  Back then, OSHA inspectors issued the company a $30 fine for storage of anhydrous ammonia. They also cited the company for failing to follow respiratory protection standards, although they didn’t fine the company for those.

Now, 28 years later, they’ve finally decided to do a follow up. OSHA has sent inspectors to the explosion site to determine if there were workplace health and  safety violations. Over the past 30 years, the ratio of OSHA inspectors to workers has dropped significantly, to the point that they have 2,200 inspectors total for the country’s 8 million workplaces and 130 million workers.

If you think the amount of time you’ve been at your job protects you if you choose to be unsafe at work, a recent arbitration case in Ontario should put that notion to rest.

The worker in question had worked 37 years for a lead recycler. Lead recyclers have very strict safety rules to follow as employers, according to the Ontario Occupational Health and Safety Act, including requiring the use of respirators and to monitor all workers for lead exposure.

According to the mediator, the employee had been written up seven times over the last year of his employment, most for safety violations. At the time the employer had decided to let their long-time worker go, they had to write him up twice in two days. The first time, the worker had chosen to work in the plant without a hard hat, safety glasses and mask. The very next day, he was caught working in the plant without a  respirator, and he wasn’t clean shaven for an effective mask seal. These two incidents came less than a month after the worker had been given a written warning and counselling for much the same type of health and safety violations, and just over four months after he had served a 25-day suspension for repeated violations over a six week period.

The arbitrator cited the fact that the worker had not “fully acknowledge(d) or accept(ed) responsibility for his misconduct on either April 30 or May 1, 2012. The company has reasonably concluded that its efforts to rehabilitate the grievor have been fruitless, and that it can no longer tolerate his presence in the workplace.”

In his decision, the arbitrator noted that the worker’s continuing safety violations, and the lack of a meaningful apology, are more meaningful than his many years of service. He noted that “workplace health and safety is a serious matter. … arbitrators (must) take the mutual responsibility of employers, unions, and employees to ensure workplace health and safety is very seriously . . . Lengthy service by itself has less mitigation currency in health and safety misconduct cases than it has in other kinds of cases.”

No matter how long you’ve worked at your job, safety is always an important concern.

Documentation is the key element to prove your case!

After a years-long fight, last week the Nova Scotia legislature tabled new legislation that would allow the province to reimburse pension benefits that had been denied to 108 widows whose husbands had been killed on the job, because they remarried at the wrong time.

According to the newly amended Widows Pension Act, the women are now entitled to full retroactive widows’ benefits, which means they will get about $110,000 each. The law had been changed in 1999 so that remarried women could continue to receive survivors’ benefits retroactive to the date when they remarried, but there was just one problem. Because of the way the law was written, for women who remarried before 1985, those benefits were only retroactive to 1999.

The latest change was spearheaded by Betty Baumann of Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. Her first husband had been killed in a rock fall at a Devco coal mine in Cape Breton back in 1960.

According to the Nova Scotia provincial government, most of the money to go to the widows will come from the Workers’ Compensation Board’s accident fund, which covers workers injured on the job, while those employers who are self-insured, such as the government, will have to foot their own portion of the bill.