National COSH 2025 ‘Dirty Dozen’ Calls Out Strip Club Industry

• The National Council for Occupational Safety and Health is out with its 2025 “Dirty Dozen” list, highlighting 12 employers accused of endangering workers through preventable hazards and repeated safety violations.
• Topping the list is Alpha Foliage, a Florida plant nursery that employs around 200 workers.
• In the number two slot is Barnes Farming, the North Carolina company that claims to be the world’s biggest sweet potato producer.
• The strip club industry, ranked 11th, is cited as “notoriously dangerous for workers,” in the report.
• Dancers at California’s Star Garden club “are forced to endure biting, licking, groping and slapping by customers.”
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Harvard Public Health Experts Raise Concerns on NIOSH Funding Cuts

• Experts at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health fear that workers across the U.S. will be less safe, that research about how to prevent worker illness and injury will slow, and that the pipeline of experts in occupational health and safety will shrink.
• NIOSH funds national research on workplace health and safety, including at two Harvard Chan School centers.
• The school’s Center for Work, Health, & Well-Being receives funding from NIOSH’s Total Worker Health Program, which, if cut “it would threaten this research and the impact it can have on workers’ ability to stay healthy and thrive in their work,” said the center’s co-director, Glorian Sorensen.
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Miner’s Federal Court Challenge on NIOSH Cuts Slated for Hearing

• A West Virginia coal miner’s lawsuit filed on April 7 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia against Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over federal cuts affecting the NIOSH facility in Morgantown, West Virginia, has been scheduled for a hearing next month.
• More than 200 employees of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health facility in Morgantown were part of a reduction in force earlier this month as a part of a restructuring of the Department of Health and Human Services. The changes, meant to save $1.8 billion a year, will reduce HHS staffing from 82,000 to 62,000 full-time employees.
• According to the miner’s complaint, the Morgantown NIOSH office typically interprets miners’ lung X-rays and informs them of any rights they have under the federal Part 90, a provision of the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act that allows miners developing black lung to move to a lower dust area of the mine.
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