Tag - occupational health

THE CHIPS ARE FALLING: Health Hazards in the Microelectronics Industry

Myths persist where facts are absent. The microelectronics industry is perceived as clean due to the absence of contrary facts, and because there is so much to be gained by neglecting the bad news about high-tech. The high-tech industry is touted by both liberal and conservative politicians as the industrial salvation...

Education and Research in Occupational Health

For several years now the CSN and the FTQ have organized workshops on occupational safety and health. These sessions are aimed at informing and promoting awareness among workers, as well as mobilizing and organizing around issues and actions leading to the improvement of working conditions. The sessions are built...

Nicaragua: Disability, After the Revolution

The disabled of Nicaragua have a collective history of which they can be proud. Many of them became disabled while fighting the dictatorship. A good many blind people used their disability as a disguise of innocence while smuggling messages and arms to the Sandinistas during the insurrection. They now have a...

Earth Day at Livermore is Like Brotherhood Week at Auschwitz

I went to Livermore looking for some lessons in reality, and came away alarmed. Hoping to find the advocate's defense of radiation, I found discussions of Communication, of Good Works, of Hazards, and of Fate — probable themes for a medieval morality play, but hardly what one expects from an ultra-modern scientific...

More Than Better Pay: If the Swedes Can Do It…

It wasn’t paradise, but the work environment in the Anebyhus Company’s sawmill was much better than in mills in North America. And it was just one of many impressive work sites visited by eight IWA members and staff and two government officials during a two-week study tour of the wood products industry in Sweden.

It’s the Real Thing: Coke Oven Cancer

For nearly a decade a major battle has been waged over conditions in coke plants. While the steel industry has resisted clean-up efforts tooth and nail, the United Steel Workers of America (USWA), prodded by rank-and-file coke oven workers, has won definite improvements in conditions in coke plants. Still, most plants...

Dying for a Job

Until chemical manufacturers are taken to task for supplying unsuspecting workers and other purchasers with chemical time bombs, we will all be relying, to our peril, on a philosophy roughly the equivalent of “Better Profits, But Often Worse Living, Through Chemistry.” Even before the question arises of how to control...

Danger: Women’s Work

...it is time that women stop being viewed primarily in terms of their childbearing capabilities. It is time that women's occupational health, not simply pregnant women's health, be studied and dealt with.

A Ton of Cure: Why There Is No Cancer Prevention

There is much more profit in finding a cure for cancer than in preventing the disease. Industry tries to manipulate cancer prevention into a case of the environmentalists against the workers; just as nuclear power, uranium mining, automobile emissions standards, and too many others have been previously manipulated...

Nonionizing Radiation: Unsung Villain?

Nonionizing radiation is an example of a presumed benevolent technology which, because found useful for military and corporate purposes and for social benefit, has become intertwined in our lives to a potentially dangerous level. When it first gained widespread use some 30 to 50 years ago, little work was done to...