"[P]eople acting in a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about." - FDR

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Friday, December 10, 2004

Hit and run: Reg policy news briefs

• Over the past several months, a divided NLRB has issued decisions that strip workers of legal protections. In November, employees of temp agencies were barred from organizing with regular employees without both employer and agency permission. Prohibitions on communications between workers expressing displeasure or anger over working conditions were ruled lawful last month, and are no longer assumed to interfere with employee free speech around union activity. In September, the NLRB determined that disabled workers who receive rehabilitative services from employers should not be classified as workers and are therefore ineligible to form unions under the protections of federal law. The agency released a similar decision in July for graduate teaching and research assistants, ruling that they are students and not employees. “We know that workers are under attack when they organize, and the government should be offering them more protection, not less,” says American Rights at Work.

• Meanwhile, also from American Rights at Work: a worker in the United States is fired or discriminated against every 23 minutes for exercising his freedom of association on the job. “Workers are under attack and most Americans don’t even know it,” says ARW. “Protecting workers’ rights to form unions is U.S. law, and a human rights standard that our country helped create.”

• The stakes are higher than ever for workers to be able to organize and to expect strong regulatory protections that ensure safe and healthy workplaces. A new report from Liberty Mutual reveals that the cost of serious workplace injuries continues to soar, even after adjusting for medical and wage inflation. In fact, over half of the 12.1 percent increase between 1998 and 2002 happened in 2002, despite a drop in the number of serious injuries over those four years.

• Just what does the Bush administration have against science? PEER has discovered that EPA censored the warnings of its professional staff about a Bush Administration plan to build more roads across national forests. EPA deleted comments about a host of environmental problems, ranging from impaired public drinking water to spreading invasive plants, from comments it submitted to the U.S. Forest Service on November 26th.