News and Updates

Underground Economy

Young Workers Stay Hot

Legislative Update

Workers Shaped the Environmental Movement

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News and Updates       

• On May 30, MassCOSH was honored to receive an award from the Merrimack Valley Central Labor Council for Excellence in Coalition Building.  Thank you to MVCLC for recognizing our hard work and efforts to build a stronger health and safety movement.  

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A new task force targeting employers who operate under-the-table and violate labor laws has mobilized the labor and legal community as well as other groups interested in supporting the state’s new efforts to strengthen enforcement while ensuring that workers are not harmed in the process.  Public meetings on the task force, which was established in March through a Governor’s executive order, are being conducted around the state.  The first was held just two weeks ago in western Massachusetts.

MassCOSH has been working with community, unions and its lawyers’ committee to support the task force, while developing recommendations to help protect workers, particularly immigrants, who might be put at increased risk, including:

• Adopting procedures for affirmatively protecting employees in the enforcement process. 
• Making clear publicly that the Task Force and participating agencies do not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement efforts.
• Establishing an advisory panel, as specified in the Governor’s Executive Order, that represents workers whose livelihood is put at risk. 

Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Organization (MIRA) Executive Director Eva Millona who spoke at the June 23rd meeting in Holoyoke said, “We strongly urge this Task Force to do everything within its power to protect the rights of victims of abusive employers. The Task Force’s enforcement efforts should be clearly focused on employer fraud and wrongdoing.”

Working with a labor/community task force, MassCOSH will also be developing recommendations so it is easier for workers to apply for and obtain workers compensation when they’re injured.  Workers compensation fraud is a key target of the task force, as employers in the underground economy often fail to provide this protection for their workers. 

When the dates for the eastern Massachusetts public meetings on the Underground Economy Task Force become available, MassCOSH will post them on our website – www.masscosh.org.  To learn more or for further information contact Marcy Goldstein-Gelb at marcy.gelb@masscosh.org or 617-825-7233 x15.
 

Young workers stay hot

Radio public service announcements were recorded and broadcast by teens from the Brazilian Immigrant Center, outreach posters featuring young workers' rights were designed by a group from New Bedford CEDC, The Welcome Project distributed an informational presentation to their partners and the Red Cross of Boston hosted a “youth union” to educate young workers about their rights in the workplace through fun and interactive workshops.

LEAPS and the ensuing LEAPS Summit were achieved as a result of the hard work of the peer leaders at TL@W and Jovenes Latinos of Community Action Agency of Somerville – with substantial support from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the Attorney General’s Office, and wonderful volunteers.  To learn more about TL@W or LEAPS click here.

With the formal legislative session ending on July 31, MassCOSH and its allies are targeting three key health and safety bills for a final push for passage.   

The Act for a Healthy Massachusetts (House Bill 783, Senate Bill 558) which creates a program to replace toxic chemicals with safer alternatives, is in the hands of the House.  The bill made great progress this year – moving through its committee and the Senate – but needs a wave of pressure to get through the House.  Please call your state representative and urge him/her to support this bill.  Click here to contact him/her by email.

Meanwhile, it looks like a bill that would prohibit the use and sale of highly flammable floor finishing products for commercial wood floor finishing operations (House Bill 2407) Public Safety and Homeland Security may soon be in the hands of the House Ways and Means Committee.  To help ensure that it moves out of the Public Safety Comittee, please call Senator James Timilty at (617) 722-1222 and urge him to support the bill.

Finally, the Public Sector OSHA (House Bill 1866, Senate Bill 1088) bill, which extends OSHA health and safety protections to public employees recently moved through its committee and is now in Senate Ways and Means.  Please contact Senate Ways and Means chair Steven Panagiotakis and urge him to support the bill.  Click here to join our online campaign!

 
Workers shaped the modern environmental movement, new book says
By: Chad Montrie 

According to corporations and their political allies, “jobs” and “environment” are mutually exclusive.  We can’t attend to both.  We have to choose between putting food on the table and breathing clean air.  Regrettably, some people believe this, however much they wish it wasn’t so.  They accept the narrow perspective as unfortunate but true, unable to imagine another way of thinking through the problem.

The past, however, is another story.  Organized labor and many unaffiliated workers have played a critical role in making the American environmental movement.  This is something historians are only just beginning to understand.  Sifting through records in archives, reading old union journals, and listening to oral histories, they have started to outline a narrative about workers fighting for jobs and the environment, as inextricably linked parts of a decent standard of living. 

To be sure, not all unions or unorganized workers have been receptive to environmentalism, and there was conflict between labor and environmental groups.  Union support for environmental regulations also changed over time, as the political and economic context changed.  But rediscovering the history of environmentally aware unions, by no means anomalies, challenges prevailing interpretations of the past, and it gives us a different frame for seeing the present.

MassCOSH works hard to make the connection a positive one between workers and the environment, particularly working with environmental groups to ensure that people are safe and healthy in their jobs, their communities and at home.  Click here for more resources on the subject.

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