NEW SOLUTIONS: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy

This is a case study of ongoing relations between the Phelps Dodge mining company, a United Steelworkers local representing 560 employees at the company's Chino Mines in New Mexico, and an array of other concerned stakeholders.

This case study shows that labor can be a full partner in environmental advocacy, and even take a leadership role in building a strong multi-stakeholder alliance for corporate accountability. While the case also shows that corporate jobs blackmail is alive and well in the global economy, the labor community-coalition that has emerged at the mining complex has broken some new ground. The approach taken attends to diverse stakeholder interests—cultural protection issues of Native-American and Mexican-American ethnic groups; conservation, groundwater and Right-to-Know issues of traditional environmental constituencies; and environmental liability and disclosure concerns of corporate shareholders. Among the key developments are:

A new approach to corporate reporting to shareholders as an enforcement and right-to-know tool;

Endocrine disruption has come under regulatory scrutiny since the passage of 1996 federal laws. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) convened the Endocrine Disruptor Screening and Testing Advisory Committee (EDSTAC) to develop recommendations for a screening and testing program to assess chemicals' potential to disrupt hormone function.

The committee's September 1998 consensus report is important because it signals that endocrine disruption is a threat which a responsible society has an obligation to address. Furthermore, the program will generate significant new toxicological data.

However, shortcomings in the EPA program will include: inadequate low dose testing; lack of a screening assay that examines early developmental exposure; and mechanisms that substitute “functionally equivalent” information.

Implementation will face serious hurdles: insufficient funding; realistic validation yardsticks; resolution of crucial scientific questions, and political will.

A wide diversity of constituencies appeared before the EDSTAC during public meetings, and the public will stay engaged by commenting on EPA's proposed program and by nominating chemicals for inclusion in the program.

A meaningful response to endocrine disruption exposes a fundamental flaw in traditional risk assessment. If there is no “safe” exposure, there is also no regulatory threshold to identify.

This article draws on survey and interview data from New Jersey occupational health and safety professionals and union members to provide insights into the interactions among workers, management, unions, and health and safety professionals that shape work place conditions and practices. A substantial number of both professionals and union members reported: serious or very serious health and safety problems; limited access to effective resources for addressing these problems; and the presence of serious barriers to resolving these problems. Fewer than half of the union and professional respondents reported that effective participatory mechanisms such as union/management health and safety committees existed at their work sites, and many interview respondents described situations in which serious problems might be aired but seldom resolved.

Tobacco control is a successful public health movement, but little attention is being paid to what this success means for workers and communities who are economically dependent on tobacco. The social context of job loss for these workers remains largely unstudied. We conducted a case study of a cigarette manufacturing facility closure in Reidsville, North Carolina and report on the effects of the closure for workers and the community. Results suggest the need for: 1) worker education directed toward developing skills for jobs that pay family-supporting wages, and 2) community-driven strategies to attract new businesses that offer such jobs. Public health organizations, labor unions, community development groups, business representatives, civic leaders, academic institutions, and others should unite in efforts to assist tobacco- dependent workers and communities to transition to other economic bases. These efforts should be funded by the tobacco industry.

This article is a study of the state's role in workers' health in South Korea during the period of the 1950s to 1980s in which South Korea achieved its economic success through a series of economic development plans. The state's role in the protection of workers' health will be examined by investigating the historical development of two main welfare state programs, workers' compensation and national health insurance, as the pillars of state policies on workers' health. In contrast to the state's direct intervention in economic development, I will argue, the key characteristics of both workers' compensation and national health insurance are the state's minimal organizational and financial costs and the relative autonomy of firm managers. Also, the state first restricted the scope of beneficiaries to the core group of manufacturing and mining workers and then gradually expanded it over a long period of time. I will argue that such features suggest a strong dependence on business by the Korean welfare state programs that contradicts the image of a strong state that the scholars of East Asian states often claim.

Strategies for occupational safety and health campaigns often overlook the possibilities afforded by initiatives centered in the workplace itself, as opposed to those focused, for example, at the bargaining table or in the legislature. Workers themselves sometimes may be more cognizant and informed of immediate health and safety issues than are their union representatives, and may formulate innovative or unorthodox approaches to hazard remediation. Such approaches may in fact succeed despite ineffectual contract language or weak regulatory protection. This article examines a successful struggle by a small group of telecommunications technicians to get the employer to revise its obsolete procedures for atmospheric testing of unventilated, underground cable vaults. It demonstrates that increased consideration should be given to shopfloor actions and creative use of the grievance procedure as useful tools in the struggle for occupational safety and health.