Alabama Opens New Workplace Safety Training Facility

• The University of Alabama has opened FORTE, or Facility for Outreach, Research, Training and Education, as the new home of UA Safe State’s OSHA training education center.
• The facility is designed as a hub for workplace safety and professional development for industries across the state and region.
• Dr. Clifford Henderson, the Dean of the College of Engineering at UA, said its impact on the workforce in Alabama is hard to overstate.
• “Our unit here in the College of Engineering UA Safe State really is the major worker safety training and education across the state,” Henderson said. On a yearly basis, we help hundreds of companies and thousands of workers get experience and training related to industrial safety, environmental hygiene and other related areas.”
  READ MORE

Cannabis Operators Face Workplace Health, Safety Scrutiny

• A new report emphasizes the importance of cannabis operators acknowledging the well-known hierarchy of occupational safety and health controls and implementing appropriate responses to address work-related asthma.
• While it is impossible to eliminate any hazards from cannabis itself, it is possible to eliminate certain other hazards, such as exposure to disinfectants, and to minimize exposure to mold, according to findings from California, Massachusetts, Michigan and Washington, published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
• Using data from the four state-based surveillance systems, work-related asthma cases within the cannabis industry were identified and classified as new-onset asthma or work-aggravated asthma.
• A number of inter-related issues may appear all at once for a cannabis employer, according to the report.
  READ MORE

Minnesota DoT Stand Down Follows Contractor Deaths

• The Minnesota Department of Transportation paused work statewide Monday, holding the first-ever statewide safety stand down to honor the deaths of two construction contractors on Minnesota roads last week and to focus on improving safety in work zones.
• Officials say the stand down is a deliberate pause in work to reflect on the recent lives lost, but it is also a time for staff to recommit to safety standards.
  READ MORE

Labor-backed Think Tank Details State Solutions to ‘Worker Rights Crisis’

• The Economic Policy Institute on Monday issued a detailed report on what states should do to protect and expand workplace health and safety standards as Federal worker protections come under attack.
• EPI is a research institution funded, chaired, and promoted by labor unions and labor union supporters, according to Influence Watch. It distributes research studies supporting the labor union agenda by promoting international trade restrictions.
• Among the steps it recommends for so-called Federal OSHA state, are updating state laws and standards to lock in current federal protections, and,the passage of worker health and safety trigger laws.
• For state plan states, it encouraged the full adoption of current federal standards.
  READ MORE