Texas Watch—Consumer Protection. Corporate Accountability. Citizen Advocacy.

The Austin City Council told employers Thursday that they must allow construction workers to take rest breaks.

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

Consumer, environmental, and labor advocates testified at a legislative hearing today about the importance of reversing the decades long trend of corporate immunity in Texas.

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. Read More »

On Thursday, two legislative committees will convene to discuss “third-party liability issues involving workers’ compensation.”  Even though the topic of this hearing was set long before the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, BP puts the hearing in a new light that spurs a second look at our pro-defendant civil justice system and the impact immunity for BP-style disasters has on workers, communities, and the environment.  We have a new video putting the focus where it should be. Read More »

Right in our backyard is the most dangerous industrial plant in the nation.  It is owned and operated by none other than BP.  The plant in Texas City has a long and notorious track record of “willful and egregious” safety violations.  Under current law, BP is immune from responsibility for needlessly killing or injuring its workers in Texas.  Why? Read More »

A confidential survey of workers on the Deepwater Horizon in the weeks before the oil rig exploded showed that many of them were concerned about safety practices and feared reprisals if they reported mistakes or other problems.

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

Some insurance companies have cited uninsured motorists as one of the most popular reasons for higher insurance premiums.

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

Nurse Craig Peske was fired from a hospital in Wausau, Wis., in 2007 after stealing the powerful painkiller Dilaudid “whenever the opportunity arose,” state records say. In one three-month period, he signed out 245 syringes full of the drug — nine times the average of his fellow nurses.

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

Check out Texas Watch’s newest web video reminding Gov. Rick Perry that he promised to fix our broken homeowners insurance market in 2002.  It is 2010 and nothing has changed. Read More »

The federal government issued new rules Tuesday that will reward doctors and hospitals for the “meaningful use” of electronic health records, a top goal of President Obama.

The rules significantly scale back proposed requirements that the health care industry had denounced as unrealistic.

The Department of Health and Human Services said doctors and hospitals could receive as much as $27 billion over the next 10 years to buy equipment to computerize patients’ medical records. A doctor can receive up to $44,000 under Medicare and $63,750 under Medicaid, while a hospital can receive millions of dollars, depending on its size.

Starting in 2015, hospitals and doctors will be subject to financial penalties under Medicare if they are not using electronic health records.

Dr. Donald M. Berwick, who was sworn in Monday as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said electronic health records would lead to “better, smoother care, more reliable care.”

Read More: The New York Times

State Farm is raising auto insurance rates an average 2 percent next month for the nearly 3 million drivers it insures in Texas, citing rising medical costs as the primary factor.

The company’s largest auto insurance subsidiary, State Farm Mutual, has notified the Texas Department of Insurance that the rate hike will be effective on renewals and new customers as of Aug. 16.

State Farm County Mutual, another subsidiary that primarily insures higher-risk drivers, will increase rates an average 6.8 percent in August. About 230,000 drivers are covered by State Farm County Mutual.

Public Insurance Counsel Deeia Beck, whose office represents Texas insurance consumers, filed objections to the rate hike Tuesday, saying State Farm’s justification isn’t good enough. She called on Insurance Commissioner Mike Geeslin to reject the increase.

“The filing would, if implemented, produce rates that are excessive, unreasonable and unfairly discriminatory,” Beck said in a letter delivered to the insurance department.

An insurance department spokesman said the rate filing is under review.

Read More: The Dallas Morning News