Rachel Rubin MD, MPH
Division Chair, Occupational Medicine
Stroger Hospital of Cook County and Rush Medical College
Assistant Professor
University of Illinois School of Public Health
rrubin@uic.edu, (312) 864-5520

Section Update:

As my first message to the Section as chair, I want to mention several changes in leadership as well the positions we need to fill for our upcoming election. The current secretary is Celeste Monforton. The chair-elect who will take office at the end of the Boston meeting is Jim Cone, and secretary-elect is Darius Sivin. Our program chair for the upcoming conference is Butch de Castro, who is already hard at work and is asking for anyone willing to review abstracts, to contact him at <butch@uic.edu>. Mary Miller has taken on the monumental task of being our representative on the Action Board and has already put out calls for several potential resolutions from the Section to be submitted for the coming meeting. The Membership Committee chair position has been taken over by Paul Landsbergis, with great thanks to the prior Chair Eduardo Siqueira. Peter Dooley is taking over the responsibilities for the Awards Committee chairmanship, and I want to especially thank our new Section liaison to the Student Assembly LaTrice Porter-Thomas. LaTrice is one of our scholarship winners from this past year and is a graduate student at the University of Illinois School of Public Health. We welcome her most enthusiastic participation in our Section leadership. This sSction had its first conference call of the year in January. Following in the tradition of Mike Silverstein, the conference call was well attended, and we have come up with several ideas for solicited sessions for the upcoming meeting in Boston.

Several leadership positions in our Section are up for election. John Morawetz, as head of the Nominations Committee is soliciting nominations for chair-elect, secretary-elect, two Section Counselors and two Governing Counselors. The chair-elect and secretary-elect will take over their “elect” positions at the end of the upcoming meeting. They will then become the chair and secretary respectively at the end of the 2007 meeting, thus being the chairs for 2008. If this sounds confusing, it is. We just want folks who are willing to take over in two years as Chair and Secretary. All nominations are welcome, and please forward them to John Morawetz before the Feb. 28 deadline. In addition, we have two Section Counselors and two Governing Counselors to elect, who will assume office at the end of the Boston meeting.

The membership in our Section continues to drop and we are now down to three Section Counselors from our prior quota of four last year. I want to thank our outgoing Governing Counselors Elise Pechter and Darius Sivin; they represented our section with aplomb and appropriate militancy over their terms. Our new Governing Counselor is Andrea Kidd-Taylor, who is joining Peter Dooley and Luis Vazquez, whose terms end in 2007. We have an opening for one new Section Counselor. Again, nominations close on Feb. 28, so anyone who is interested please contact John Morawetz at (513) 621-8882 or by e-mail at jmorawetz@icwu.org.

The planning for the program for the upcoming conference is well under way under the ample directorship of Butch de Castro. Abstracts were due Feb. 16, and after that time unsolicited abstracts cannot be accepted. However, several priorities and ideas for solicited sessions have been selected by the leadership and anyone interested in the following topics are invited to contact Butch if they want to help organize a session.

• Eduardo Siqueira is organizing a session on occupational health and safety initiatives in Latin American, specifically including discussions about the recent national Congress for Workers Safety Health in Brazil, that I had the great fortune to attend in November 2005, and a conference this January on workers' health and safety in Venezuela. These two countries provide tremendous models for worker and community participation in creating and implementing national priorities and policies for workers safety and health and environmental health.

• A joint session is being planned with the Environment Section regarding the electronics industry. We had been trying to build stronger connections with the Environment Section, and this session is a renewed effort at collaboration.

• Thirdly, a major national report on the situation of day laborers in the United States has just been published and a session on day laborers is being organized by Peter Dooley <laborsafe@aol.com> and Leslie Nickels <lnickels@uic.edu>. Anyone who wants input on this topic for that session can contact either of them.

• As has been our tradition we want to present a session related to the history of workers health and Leslie Nickels <lnickels@uic.edu> will be looking into organizing that session.

• Finally, discussion occurred at the past meeting in Philadelphia that in light of the ongoing war in Iraq, each section should try to have one session on the impact of war with respect to their particular area of interest within public health. The theme of the meeting is Public Health and Human Rights, so expressing our opposition to the war as an infringement of human rights and a major public health issue seems appropriate. If there is anyone interested in helping organize a session on the impact of war on occupational health safety, can contact Butch de Castro <butch@uic.edu> or me.

A couple of other concerns for the Section have come up over the last month. Executive Director Georges Benjamin has contacted the Section for help in developing an Association response to the attack on public health professionals by industry and business-community interests. We are making contact with the Union of Concerned Scientists and other interested individuals to help us formulate an action plan for addressing this issue, which is a continuing problem among occupational health and safety professionals in particular. This attack on the integrity of public health professionals who are trying to support workers’ rights is symptomatic of a larger attack under the Bush administration on the integrity of scientific evidence as it relates to the development of public policy. Anyone interested in helping forge an association-wide policy or campaign, including a resolution to address this issue, should contact me.

Resolutions coming from the Section include a revision and re-submission of the Katrina-related resolution about protecting workers involved in the clean-up and reconstruction on the Gulf coast. The policy needs to be resubmitted, as it was a late breaker at the Philadelphia meeting. In addition, other topics that people are encouraged to submit resolutions or help revise prior resolutions on include nanotechnology and avian influenza preparedness. Of course, any other policy issues that individuals would like to address are more than welcome and they should contact Mary Miller marymiller@inwa.net, (360) 902-6041 who is at the helm of our resolution writing as representative to the Action Board for the coming term. Draft resolutions are due March 15.

National Update:

The following are just a couple of recent occupational health and safety newsworthy items.

On January 2 there was a major mine disaster in the Sago Mine in West Virginia where twelve miners lost their lives, and one miner survived but was critically injured. This mine disaster is not unique by any means within the United States and certainly not internationally. However, this was also a disaster that was waiting to happen. According, to the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MHSA), the Sago Mine had been cited over 200 times in the past year; including the mine being shut down several times until appropriate safety issues could be addressed. This particular mine’s injury rate is reported to be three times the industry average, including suffering more than a dozen roof falls over the last six months. There had been no death reports at this mine since 1995; however, 42 workers and contractors have been injured in various accidents since 2000. The lost work days due to injuries over the past five years were nearly double the national average for underground coal mines according to MSHA. In the wake of the Sago disaster, another mine accident occurred in Aracoma Mine, again in West Virginia, where two miners lost their lives while 19 others were able to escape unharmed after an underground coal mine fire. It is clear that under the Bush administration MSHA has changed its focus from attempting to monitor and improve health and safety for miners to focusing on increasing coal production and supporting the electric power utilities in their search for energy sources. Safety has clearly taken a back seat to production output as oil prices continue to rise. For an excellent resource for more information about mine disaster, go to Jordan Barab’s Confined Space Web site <http://spewingforth.blogspot.com> and following the link for Mine Safety Watch, which can also be reached directly: <http://minesafetywatch.blogspot.com>.

Another issue that is finally gaining some attention is the situation of day laborers. In January of this year a report was published entitled “On the Corner: Day Labor in the United States” authored by Abel Valenzuela, Jr. (UCLA), Nik Theodore (University of Illinois at Chicago), Edwin Meléndez (New School University) and Ana Luz Gonzalez (UCLA). This report, which can be viewed on the Web at <www.uic.edu/cuppa/uicued>, highlights the growing day labor work force in the United States and the accompanying problems with work place safety, employment abuses, substandard wages and earnings, and other issues of exploitation of this predominantly immigrant workforce. The study highlights that day laborers are predominately hired to work in construction, gardening or landscaping, painting, roofing and drywall installation. The vast majority of day laborers (83 percent) rely on day labor as their primary source of income for themselves and their families. Day labor pays poorly as the medium hourly wage is only ten dollars. Numerous work place safety and employment abuses were documented in their survey including 44 percent of workers being denied food and water or breaks while on the job. Workplace injuries are common in that one in five day laborers reported to have suffered a work-related injury, and more than half of these individuals did not receive medical care for their injuries. In addition, day laborers have to suffer abuse and harassment by merchants and police while they are waiting at various pick-up sites for daily work. The survey was of 2600 day laborers randomly selected from 264 hiring sites in 139 municipalities throughout the United States. The major conclusions of the report include a call for a broader policy including a call for improved worker conditions; better enforcement of work place safety conditions; increased access to legal services for these workers; implementation of work place strategies that can help these day laborers make a transition from the informal economy into the more formal and better paying jobs, and finally for immigration reform that normalizes the immigration status of most of these day laborers who are undocumented (Source: Executive Summary of the report).

One final note: As many of you are aware, NIOSH is reorganizing its research agenda. NIOSH is currently holding hearings throughout the United States for input into the reorganization of its NORA Program. It is changing its focus to a sector-based as opposed to an issue or problem based research priority system. Many of us have concerns that this type of reorganization will decrease the emphasis on vulnerable populations and minority workers, as well as workers in the informal sector. I encourage anybody who able to testify at these hearings to sign up to do so. You can go to the NORA Web page and find out where the next set hearings will take place: http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/nora/ .

Finally, many thanks to Ingrid Denis from AOEC for a great job as our newsletter editor.