I am honored to chair the Occupational Health and Safety Section for the next year. My last term as chairp was in the early 1980s, and much has changed in our section since then. I look forward to working with you this next year.
The Annual Meeting in Boston in early November was a major success for the Occupational Health and Safety Section, thanks particularly to the work of the Section leadership, chaired by Rachel Rubin, and the Program Planning Committee, chaired by Butch DeCastro. The overall meeting theme, Public Health and Human Rights, was particularly relevant to our section, and was reflected by many activities of our section. At the meeting, our section continued its ongoing work in solidarity with hotel workers who face increasing ergonomic hazards. As documented by a recent participatory action research study by Nick Krause, T. Scherzer and Reiner Rugulies, most hotel room cleaners experience severe back or neck pain. Severe pain was found to have strong associations with physical workload, work intensification, and ergonomic problems. Thanks to Pamela Vossenas for facilitating Section activities during the Annual Meeting around this issue.
Some of the current policy challenges that face us in occupational health and safety include:
a. Health care reform – How do we insure that reforms address issues of worker health and safety, workers’ compensation, and specifically health care worker health and safety?
b. Immigrant workers, day laborers, contingent work force – How can we adapt traditional approaches or develop innovative, new approaches to training, enforcement of standards, and other public health prevention to reduce the relatively unsafe jobs faced by these growing sectors of workers?
c. How do we promote an effective rights-based approach to occupational health and safety?
Thanks for activities by Section members, particularly chairpersons of our Section committees. Please see the OH&S Section’s new e-Communities Web page (https://secure.apha.org/source/communities/userhomepage.cfm) for a current list of chairpersons (it is posted as a bulletin board listing as: Current OH&S Section Leadership 1_4_07.pdf). Please let me know if you are interested in contributing to the Section in any way; joining an existing committee, or helping to start a new initiative are excellent ways to get more involved and active.
New initiatives for 2007 include:
d. E-Communities – The new APHA-wide communication center for sections, including news postings, online discussions of important section issues, and a bulletin board for key documents. Please let me know if you would like an interactive orientation to this great new tool, currently being tested by OH&S and several other APHA sections.
e. Immigrant Worker H&S Institute – This idea was proposed at the November 2006 Annual Meeting, to provide a focus for activities around occupational health and safety among immigrant worker populations. Please contact me if you would like to join this effort.
f. Expanding our Membership. Our section had 716 members as of Nov. 30, 2006. Thanks to Paul Landsbergis, chair of our Membership Committee, we have been increasingly active in recruiting new members. Attendees at the final Section Meeting in November agreed to join a campaign, “each one recruit one”, as we set a goal to expand our Section’s membership to over 750 members by August 2007.
g. Policy Reviews – At the suggestion of members attending our Section meeting in November, we would like to increase our Section’s input on the various resolutions that APHA considers each year in hearings at Annual Meeting. To do this, we need volunteers to review resolutions that will be submitted to APHA in the spring. If you are interested in helping, please contact Policy and Resolutions Committee Co-Chair, Mary Miller, (360)902-6041.
h. Proposing a progressive OH&S Agenda for next administration. Now is an excellent time to put forward proposals to change the direction for occupational safety and health at the federal level, particularly in light of the current change of leadership in Congress, and preparing for the next administration in 2008 in Washington, D.C. Health and safety activists in various states have developed policy proposal initiatives for changes of players at the state government level, which can serve as good models for a national proposal. If you are interested in helping with this effort, please let me know.