One of the key dealmakers in the state Legislature’s recent budget agreement is a package of amendments to reform last year’s SB 796, the law signed by Gray Davis that employer groups have dubbed the “Sue Your Boss” law. SB 1809, authored by state Sen. Joe Dunn (D-Garden Grove), recently was amended to address concerns …
OAKLAND — Members of the health care community generally supported a draft proposal by the Division of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH) to protect health care workers from airborne exposure to infectious diseases. But medical community representatives who attended a July 26 meeting to discuss a conceptual draft of the proposal said DOSH needs to …
OAKLAND — West Nile virus’ inexorable march across the United States is leading to an inexorable march up California and, for the first time, human deaths. The disease, which appeared in New York in 1999 and has steadily been making its way west ever since, has claimed the lives of two Southern California men in …
OAKLAND — The City of Riverside has announced a job opening for a safety and training analyst. The position will report to the city safety officer and will have primary responsibility for the public works department. The analyst, among other duties, will assist in developing and administering effective safety standards, review accident reports and inspect …
OAKLAND — To increase protection for roadway workers, the Federal Highway Administration (FHA) has made revisions to the 2003 Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways (MUTCD). The manual has always focused on the use of traffic control devices to increase visibility for drivers, as well as the use of traffic cones, …
A new program that aims to standardize occupational safety and health curricula and train workers to become safety specialists is paying off for a family-owned company in East Los Angeles. On July 29, six Spanish-speaking “worker leaders” from Felbro, Inc., which manufactures metal display racks, earned certificates from the Worker Occupational Safety and Health Training …
OAKLAND — The titles on our two July 30 charts providing the complete 2003 inspection and citation statistics for the Division of Occupational Safety and Health (p. 8259) inadvertently were transposed from earlier-published charts. They should have read, respectively: “DOSH Inspection Statistics, January-December 2003” and “DOSH On-Site Inspections and Violations Cited, Major Industrial Groups, January-December …
In our July 2 edition (p. 8235), we reported about inspections of the new Eastern Span project of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. In June, several welders who had been laid off from the project alleged that they had been exposed to dangerous levels of manganese and other welding fumes while working within the caissons …