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

In response to recent requests from advocacy organizations and individuals to issue regulations that would limit the work hours of resident physicians, OSHA Administrator Dr. David Michaels acknowledged that long working hours and worker fatigue is a safety concern not only for medical residents, but for employees in other industries as well.

According to OSHA, Public Citizen, a national advocacy organization, and other groups and individuals have petitioned the agency for legislative action on this issue.

“We are very concerned about medical residents working extremely long hours, and we know of evidence linking sleep deprivation with an increased risk of needle sticks, puncture wounds, lacerations, medical errors and motor vehicle accidents. We will review and consider the petition on this subject submitted by Public Citizen and others,” Michaels said.

Michaels added that the U.S. Chemical Safety Board’s investigation of the fatal 2005 BP Texas City oil refinery explosion identified worker fatigue and long work hours as a likely contributing factor to the deadly blast, demonstrating that this issue goes beyond the medical field.

Read More: EHS Today

Workplace homicides and suicides in Texas each increased by almost a quarter last year as the state saw a 3.6 percent increase in worker deaths from the previous year, according to a U.S. Department of Labor report released Thursday.

Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that Texas had 480 workplace deaths in 2009, including 163 from transportation incidents and 93 from assaults or violent acts, such as robbery. The total number of deaths was 17 more than in 2008.

Transportation deaths are consistently the leading category, said John Greeley, spokesman for the Texas Department of Insurance. The state agency’s workers compensation division compiles data for the federal report, which isn’t yet final.

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In Texas, 463 workplace deaths were reported in 2008, a decrease from the 528 workers who died in 2007. In 2006 489 deaths were reported, and there were 495 a year earlier.

Alex Winslow, executive director of Texas Watch, a consumer advocacy group, said workers have no state agency to ensure safety.

“We don’t have a formal process to police and oversee the safety of workers, and we don’t have a legal system in place that allows workers who are injured to hold their employers accountable,” he said.

Read More: Statesman.com

BP has agreed to pay a record $50.6 million fine to the federal government for safety violations found by regulators last year at its troubled refinery in Texas City, Tex.

In addition to the record fine, BP has agreed to take immediate steps to protect those now working at the refinery and spend at least $500 million on that effort, according to the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Last October, OSHA proposed fining BP $87 million, later reduced slightly, after it found that the company had failed to correct problems at the Texas City refinery under a previous settlement. That settlement with the safety agency followed an explosion in 2005 that killed 15 workers and injured more than 170 people.

BP had disputed most of the 2009 findings. But under the agreement announced Thursday, the company accepted the government’s penalties for failing to fix problems as promised in the previous settlement.

BP is continuing to contest $30.7 million in proposed penalties for the 439 new safety violations that OSHA inspectors found in 2009. The company said in a statement that it hoped the agreement would provide a “platform to resolve the remaining citations.”

“This agreement achieves our goal of protecting workers at the refinery and ensuring that critical safety upgrades are made as quickly as possible,” the labor secretary, Hilda L. Solis, said in a statement. “The size of the penalty rightly reflects BP’s disregard for workplace safety and shows that we will enforce the law so workers can return home safe at the end of their day.”

Read More: The New York Times

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 »

Few tears will be shed for ousted BP chief executive Tony Hayward, who famously attended a yacht race while his company’s blown-out oil well decorated the Gulf of Mexico with crude, and who whined to reporters during the crisis that he wanted “my life back.”

He’ll get his wish in October, when he’ll be succeeded by fellow BP executive Robert Dudley, whose to-do list has at least four urgent items: Make sure the well is finally capped, put a less obnoxious face on the world’s second largest private oil company, dig the company out of its costly hole and — most important — change a culture that apparently puts safety a distant second to cutting costs.

The trouble is that BP has been through this sort of crisis before, eventually dumped a CEO, and little changed. Even now, neither Hayward nor Dudley seems to understand (or will admit) that their company has a problem. Hayward spoke Tuesday as if the April 20 blowout that killed 11 men was just a fluke: “Sometimes you step off the pavement and get hit by a bus,” he said. Yeah, but in this case, it was as if BP was running, texting and talking on a cellphone when it blundered into the street.

Investigators and heads of competing oil companies have all reached the same conclusion: BP had an unusually difficult and dangerous well on its hands in mid-April, but company supervisors repeatedly ignored standard industry practices and shaved safety margins in ways that saved time and money but made an accident more likely.

Dudley seems just as clueless as the man he’s replacing. “I don’t accept, and have not witnessed, this cutting of corners and the sacrifice of safety to drive results,” he said, according to The New York Times. You have to wonder whether this guy has been asleep for the past five years.

Read More: USA Today

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

Ever since the Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, David Senko has been tallying the similarities between what he calls “my blast” in 2005 and this new BP disaster.

“His” blast erupted on a clear March afternoon at an antiquated BP refinery that sits on the southern edge of this small Texas town. It killed 15 people — four more than died on the Deepwater Horizon — including 11 contractors in a crew that Senko led at the site. Unlike the Deepwater Horizon, however, the effects of the 2005 blast were largely confined to Texas City, so the story of what happened there quickly slipped from the national news.

The Texas City disaster has taken on new relevance today, because the investigations that were done in its aftermath reveal so much about the company that is responsible for what’s happening now in the Gulf. Government probes, court filings and BP’s own confidential investigations paint a picture of a company that ignored repeated warnings about the plant’s deteriorating condition and instead remained focused on minimizing costs and maximizing profits. According to a safety audit BP conducted just before the 2005 blast, many of the plant’s more than 2,000 employees arrived at work each day with an “exceptional degree of fear of catastrophic incidents.”

What BP has — or hasn’t done — to improve conditions at the Texas City plant since the explosion is also laid out in the documents.

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined BP $87 million last year — the largest fine in OSHA history — for failing to repair many of the safety problems that led to the blast. Four more workers have died in various accidents since then, and two chemical releases in 2007 sent more than 130 people to the hospital.

The plant has been cited so often for violating Texas’ air quality laws, which are among the nation’s weakest, that last year the Texas Attorney General’s office filed civil charges against BP in state court. The most recent violation began two weeks before the Deepwater Horizon sank into the Gulf: Over a 40-day period the plant spewed 538,000 pounds of toxic chemicals into the air, including 17,300 pounds of benzene, a known carcinogen. Environmental experts say the release ranks among the worst air quality violations in Texas in the last decade.

Read More: ProPublica