At its regular meeting, the council unanimously passed an apparently groundbreaking ordinance requiring that construction workers be granted a rest break of at least 10 minutes for every four hours worked. It also mandates that no construction worker go for more than 31/2 hours without a break.

Employers will face fines of up to $500 for each day a violation occurs.

Council Member Bill Spelman’s office said enforcement would be complaint-driven.

Greg Casar with the Austin-based Workers Defense Project said the group receives about a dozen calls a day from workers who say they either aren’t getting paid or are being put in dangerous situations .

“This may be convenient” to ignore, Casar said, “but sometimes the truth stares you in the face.”

Read More: The Austin American-Statesman

Lawmakers gathered to discuss an interim committee assignment dealing with “third party liability issues involving workers’ compensation.”  In light of recent Texas workplace disasters and the BP oil spill, advocates told a joint hearing of the House Business & Industry and Judiciary & Civil Jurisprudence committees that corporations like BP that cut corners on safety should be held fully responsible.

The groups told lawmakers to turn the page on lobby-driven proposals that are designed to immunize wrongdoers when they cause workplace catastrophes that lead to needless deaths, injuries, environmental disasters, and economic hardship for businesses and local governments.

Alex Winslow with Texas Watch:
“Industry groups like TLR want to socialize the havoc wreaked by a few bad actors who fail to make safety a priority.  Why in the world should good companies be forced to pay for the actions of dangerous ones?  Instead of protecting BP-style behavior, we should reverse the cost-benefit equation so that it costs more to cut corners on safety than it does to implement reasonable safety protocols that are proven to save lives.  The best way to do this is to hold the wrongdoers who cause needless workplace deaths and injuries fully accountable in a court of law.  BP and companies like it should pay a consequence for their egregious behavior.”

Rene Lara with Texas AFL-CIO:
“What is even more stunning about the Entergy decision is that the Texas Supreme Court  handed a blanket of legal immunity to some of the most dangerous workplaces in Texas.  Even a cursory glance at the major industrial tragedies in this state demonstrates this point dramatically.”

Craig McDonald with Texans for Public Justice:
“A spate of preventable workplace tragedies and the BP gulf disaster have brought us to a tipping point.  It’s time to slam the door on special interest groups like TLR who continually push for more limits on liability and new immunities from accountability.  The best way to protect Texas and Texans is to make sure businesses and individuals are fully responsible for the harm they do.  No more, but no less.”

Cyrus Reed with Sierra Club, Lone Star Chapter:
“If the  2005 explosion at BP’s Texas City Refinery happened today, none of the injured workers or the families of the 15 workers killed could seek redress through the courts. It also means all of the court documents that have led to multiple investigations and fines related to illegal environmental emissions and safety shortcuts by BP would never have seen the light of day. It’s time for the Legislature to step in and make sure that owners of the facilities are responsible for what happens to the workers on their site and to the environment around it.”

Michael Cunningham with Texas Building & Construction Trades Council:
“The Supreme Court decision in support of Entergy allowing owners of the most dangerous facilities to protect themselves and all their subcontractors from lawsuits from injured workers and limiting their liabilities from negligence of others is just wrong.  Even when gambling, a person has a chance of winning, but the TLR and the activist Supreme Court Justices were able to create a double-headed coin to hand the workers working in these facilities. Now these Owners get to say ‘Just Flip It and We Call It, but your injury now limits you to Workers Compensation Benefits and You Can’t Sue Anyone.’  This egregious decision prevents injured workers and their families access to the courts in order to determine the negligence of others with the ability for further compensation.”

If recent history is any guide, the discussion at Thursday’s hearing will be dominated by lobbyists pitching even more schemes to immunize their clients from accountability rather than how to prevent workplace catastrophes.  No doubt, industry groups will call for even more restrictions on the rights of workers who are harmed on the job with proposals to force them into a broken workers’ comp system or some new catastrophic injury plan which will socialize damages, forcing companies that heed safety protocols to subsidize the liability of those that don’t.

None of the lobbyist-driven proposals will prevent needless workplace injuries and deaths or protect the environment.

Texas Watch produced a new web video to remind us all what this is really about.  It is about the men and women who have lost their lives because it was cheaper for an industrial plant owner to cut corners on safety than it was to implement proven safety protocols.  One way to improve workplace safety is to reverse that calculation, making it more cost-beneficial for industry to protect workers than it is to shirk their duty to keep their workers safe.

Check out the video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Other posts of interest:

• Why Does Texas Protect BP?
• BP’s Ungodly Safety Record

15 dead at BP’s Texas City plant. 11 dead on BP’s Deepwater Horizon. Something’s got to give. Watch our new video.

The answer is obvious.  Lobbyists have been hard at work in the both the legislature and the courts carving out special protections for plant and refinery owners like BP.  Never mind the fact that BP leads the nation in refinery deaths, that 41 Texans have lost their lives because of safety lapses at its Texas City plant, or that the company has more willful safety violations than any other company by a mile.

This map from the Center for Public Integrity plots OSHA violations at plants across the country.  You can see just how BP’s plant in Texas City stacks up:

To make matters worse, those same lobbyists are astonishingly and shamefully headed to the Texas Capitol again this week to ask for even more protections for BP and its ilk.  They are expected to ask lawmakers to consider socializing the havoc wreaked by a few bad actors who fail make a safety a priority.  They plan to force even more injured workers into a broken workers’ comp system or create some new catastrophic injury plan funded by a new levy on all businesses in Texas.  Why in the world should good companies be forced to pay for the actions of dangerous ones?

Instead of protecting BP-style behavior, we should reverse the cost-benefit equation so that it costs more to cut corners on safety than it does to implement reasonable safety protocols that are proven to save lives.  The best way to do this is to hold the wrongdoers who cause needless workplace deaths and injuries fully accountable in a court of law.  BP and companies like it should pay a consequence for its egregious behavior.

Take a look at our new web video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the survey, commissioned by the rig’s owner, Transocean, workers said that company plans were not carried out properly and that they “often saw unsafe behaviors on the rig.”

Some workers also voiced concerns about poor equipment reliability, “which they believed was as a result of drilling priorities taking precedence over planned maintenance,” according to the survey, one of two Transocean reports obtained by The New York Times.

“At nine years old, Deepwater Horizon has never been in dry dock,” one worker told investigators. “We can only work around so much.”

“Run it, break it, fix it,” another worker said. “That’s how they work.”

According to a separate 112-page equipment assessment also commissioned by Transocean, many key components — including the blowout preventer rams and failsafe valves — had not been fully inspected since 2000, even though guidelines require its inspection every three to five years.

The report cited at least 26 components and systems on the rig that were in “bad” or “poor” condition.

Read More: The New York Times

But even though new data from the Texas Department of Insurance showed more Texans have car insurance, some insurance rates are still going up.

Soon after the launch of the TexasSure Vehicle Insurance Verification program in 2008, state officials said 24.28 percent of v registered vehicles in Texas did not have insurance. Department officials said as of June 2010 the number dropped to 21.65 percent of Texas drivers without auto insurance.

In El Paso, as of November 2009 115,553 or 21.57 percent of drivers did not have insurance compared to 103, 954 or 20.76 percent of uninsured motorists in June 2010, according to Texas Department of Insurance.

Two of the top five insurance providers have asked the Texas Department of Insurance to increase their rates.

Read More: KFOX-TV

Hospital officials reported him to Wisconsin nursing regulators and alerted police.

Six months later, Peske was charged with six felony counts of narcotics possession. But by that time, he had used a special “multistate” license to get a job as a traveling nurse at a hospital 1,200 miles away in New Bern, N.C.

“When I went to go for the job in North Carolina, I looked at the status of my license, and it was still active,” says Peske, 36, who was later convicted of two felony drug charges. “That kind of surprised me, so I figured I would take it.”

The ease of Peske’s move illustrates significant gaps in regulatory efforts nationwide to keep nurses from avoiding the consequences of misconduct by hopping across state lines.

The two states in which Peske worked are part of a 24-state compact created to help get good nurses to areas where they are needed most. Under the decade-old partnership, a license obtained in a nurse’s home state allows access to work in the other compact states.

But an investigation by the non-profit news organization ProPublica found that the pact also has allowed nurses with records of misconduct to put patients in jeopardy. In some cases, nurses have retained clean multistate licenses after at least one compact state had banned them. They have ignored their patients’ needs, stolen their pain medication, forgotten crucial tests or missed changes in their condition, records show.

Critics say the compact may actually multiply the risk to patients. There is no central licensing for the compact, so policing nurses is left to the vigilance of member states.

Outside the compact, each state licenses and disciplines its own nurses. But within it, states effectively agree to allow in nurses they have never reviewed.

Read More: USA Today

Click here to view the embedded video.

On February 12, 2002, Gov. Perry held a press conference in Austin discussing the problems with homeowners insurance in Texas.  He raised concerns about “troubling trends in the homeowner’s insurance market in Texas,” adding that “homeowner’s insurance is getting more expensive, coverage is becoming harder to get.”  Perry added that the Insurance Commissioner needed more authority to protect consumers from unwarranted rate increases, calling prior approval of insurance rates a “tougher option” than the file and use system that was created in 2003.  He concluded that “Prior approval would require the Insurance Commissioner to approve or disapprove certain rate increases before customers are asked to pay – increasing the Commissioner’s ability to get control of an unstable market and prevent rate shock for Texas consumers.”  (See the full text of Perry’s remarks on his official website here.)

We could not agree more.

Alas, it is more than 8 years later and Texans are still struggling with rising insurance rates and falling insurance protections.  In fact, we pay among the highest premiums in the nation – more than 76% above the national average, according to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.  And, the level of coverage available in most insurance policies is significantly less than it was just a few years ago.

We encourage Texans to contact Gov. Perry and ask him to keep his promise to support real insurance reforms that protect consumers.  Call him today at 1-800-843-5789.  Or send him an e-mail.