● "Get someone up here. We're all dying."
[Oil refineries] also pose an existential threat, as evidenced by the more than 500 refinery accidents reported to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency since 1994. The Anacortes disaster occurred five years after the BP refinery in Texas City, Texas, blew up, killing 15 workers and injuring 180. It came two years before a fire at the Chevron refinery in Richmond, California, sent a plume of pungent, black smoke over the Bay Area, and five years before an explosion at the ExxonMobil refinery in Torrance, California, nearly unleashed a ground-hugging cloud of deadly acid into a city of almost 150,000 people.
These episodes and others call into question the adequacy of EPA and U.S. Department of Labor rules that have been in place since the 1990s. The former is finishing an update, due out in early 2017, that critics say doesn’t do enough to safeguard the public; the latter is years away from floating a proposal to protect workers.
● Organizing works:
Thousands of airport employees in New York and New Jersey have successfully bargained for a minimum wage of $15 an hour and gained union recognition, in an deal with nearly a dozen airport contractors that could offer a roadmap for unionizing sub-contracted workers across the country.
The agreements are modest but symbolically significant wins for about 8,000 airport workers, who have long been a part of the Fight for $15 movement to raise the minimum wage, but had yet to win industry-specific gains. They now join healthcare workers in seeing progress on pay and conditions after linking up with the organizing effort sparked by fast-food workers in 2012.
● The hidden powers Andy Puzder would hold at the Department of Labor.
● Workers Independent News:
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