In April of this year, District Court Judge Irene C. Berger sentenced Donald Blankenship, the former CEO of Massey Energy Company (Massey) to one year in prison and ordered him to pay a fine of $250,000 for conspiring to violate mine safety standards. Massey ... More »
A girl walks into a job interview. After engaging in some small talk with her prospective employer, she is asked to undress and perform a sexual act right then and there. Outrageously inappropriate? Yes. Illegal sexual harassment within the modeling indust... More »
This post is part of a series on labor rights and health and safety issues in the fashion industry. Twenty-two year old Jamaican model Alexia Palmer is suing Donald Trump’s modeling agency, Trump Models, which she claims treated her “like a slave” since bringi... More »
The New York Times and This American Life recently collaborated to publish two harrowing accounts of Alan Pean, a hospital patient in Houston, Texas. Pean went to the hospital seeking medical attention during a manic episode and was held overnight. When he b... More »
This post is the first installment in a series on labor rights and health and safety issues in the fashion industry. The model Amy Lemons, who started modeling women’s clothing when she was 12 years old, reached supermodel status when she scored the cove... More »
Andrew Strom is Associate General Counsel of SEIU Local 32BJ. In the wake of several high profile incidents of police misconduct, there is growing support for proposals to require police officers to wear body cameras when they interact with the public. This c... More »
Jake Gersen and I have an op-ed in today’s New York Times arguing that the law should recognize “food workers” as a legal category and then offer a set of heightened employment protections to this class of employees. (Jake is a professor at ... More »
For many years, black lung disease has been thought of as a relic of the past. The last great debate over black lung disease and occupational hazards for miners happened over 40 years ago, resulting in a federal statute that requires coal companies to compens... More »
Jon Zerolnick is the Research Director at LAANE, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, where he has authored a number of reports concerning port truck drivers. Truck drivers in California’s ports have been fighting for decades for rights most workers tak... More »
On May 23, 2014, the Department of Labor announced that it would propose a new rule regarding the disclosure of medical evidence in mining compensation cases. The announcement came just a month after the Center for Public Integrity won a Pulitzer Prize for inv... More »
On Tuesday, February 4 at 10:00 a.m., the House Education and the Workforce Committee’s Subcommittee on Workforce Protections held a hearing entitled “OSHA’s Regulatory Agenda: Changing Long-Standing Policies Outside the Public Rulemaking Process.” The subcomm... More »
Yesterday, the House Education and Workforce Committee members raised concerns that OSHA has been intruding into family farms. In a letter to OSHA Assistant Secretary David Michaels, the committee requested documents surrounding guidance that unilaterally ext... More »