Documents Levenstein, Charles 17 results

"Labor unions can and should make strong allies in tobacco control efforts. Through much of the 1980s and 1990s, however, the organized labor and tobacco control communities rarely formed coalitions to achieve mutual gains. Recently, labor unions and tobacco control organizations have begun to work together on smoking cessation programs, smoke-free worksite policies, and increased insurance coverage for cessation treatments. This paper explores the historic and present-day intersections among organized labor and tobacco control advocates. We summarize research in this area and report on our recent programmatic efforts to promote collaboration between the labor and tobacco control communities. We discuss lessons learned with the aims of promoting deeper understanding among tobacco control and labor advocates of how each views tobacco control issues, and most importantly, stimulating further collaboration toward mutual gains in protecting workers' health."

"To control silicosis, we need to understand how change happens in occupational health. Science alone does not drive policy, because we have known the causes of silicosis, and how to prevent it for decades, yet the disease persists. To control occupational disease, we need to enter the social realm of work. To investigate the determinants of a successful silicosis control program, we wrote a social history of the Vermont Granite Industry from 1938 to 1960, examining union journals, newspapers, industry journals, scientific literature and government documents, and interviewing key informants. The crucial factor of the successful program was a strong public health movement to control tuberculosis, rather than pressure to control the occupational disease. Using this lesson, to protect workers from silica exposure now, we chose to regulate silica under an environmental law, the Massachusetts Toxics Use Reduction Act. Science is but one small factor, necessary but insufficient, in policy change. We in occupational health need to hitch onto a stronger movement, currently the environmental movement. Where unions are too weak to demand safe technologies, we need to learn to speak the language of employers, because they may have little idea of the costs of interventions. We need to gather more economic information about the costs of interventions."

"The Massachusetts Teachers Association's Environmental Health and Safety Committee is using a number of approaches to evaluate and improve the enforcement of the U.S. Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act legislation intended to ensure the proper management of asbestos in public buildings, including schools. The committee first approached state regulators directly concerning enforcement concerns, with limited success. Next, the Massachusetts Teachers Association developed an organizing strategy and a curriculum focusing on the requirements of the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act and on building a membership-run health and safety committee infrastructure in local unions. Five trainings took place throughout Massachusetts over a 2-month period in 2015. The committee implemented follow-up procedures and support for locals to continue to engage in this ongoing effort. This work illustrates that the passage of the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act in 1986 was insufficient action to remediate school asbestos exposures. It is necessary for unions representing school employees to systematically hold regulators and school districts accountable for enforcement and compliance."

"Based on six years spent investigating worker health and safety conditions at U.S. Department of Energy sites that were formerly engaged in the production of nuclear weapons, the authors report on a set of common themes that emerged in their interviews with workers. The initial focus of the authors was on behavior-based safety programs and their investigation revealed deep-seated mistrust of management by workers. The authors discuss the importance of trust issues for worker training and suggest that "creative mistrust" should be cultivated in training programs."

"In 1989, approximately half of the medical visits in Hungary were to factory doctors. Two thousand physicians in the National Health Service were assigned to factories and all medical students served in factories as part of their training. There were certainly problems in the system, but workers preferred the factory doctors to other physicians based in communities or districts; and factory physicians knew about workplace hazards, knew what production processes looked like, and were mandated to deal with work environment problems as well as provide other kinds of patient care. With the reform of the National Health Service, the role of factory physician was eliminated, although companies could institute their own medical services (and sometimes employed the previous medical staff). Later legislation required companies to have access to occupational medical services, but critics have called the new system "Doctors by Fax." We discuss the adequacy of the new legislative requirements (including mandatory health and safety committees) and report on new issues in worker health and safety that have emerged post "reform." Finally, the possibility of linking the prevention of occupational disease and injury prevention to "cleaner production" in Hungary is discussed. "

"We hear more and more about the necessity of "sustainable regional development" as an alternative to and defense against globalization. While we certainly agree with this notion, we ask what might prevent it from becoming yet another "top-down" development scheme with good intentions but dubious results. We would argue that no road to development is sustainable if it is not deeply democratic and reliant on an informed, concerned public; the expressed needs of the public must be an essential aspect of regional development. Our focus here is on the university, the main supplier of the experts and technologies utilized by the undemocratic processes of globalization, but it might also be a partner in a democratic process of regional sustainable development. To do this, however, experts in academia must resist the temptation to assume they know what is best and work in concert with community forces to define and create sustainable development. To put it simply, if experts and planners in the university want to know what a region wants and needs, they have to ask. What follows is a report on the experience of one university's attempt to do just that."

"This article summarizes the origins and implementation of labor-management negotiated tobacco control policies in public workplaces in New York state during the 1980s and 1990s. It is an in-depth case study that illustrates the confrontation and cooperation among three main social actors involved in the design and implementation of workplace smoking policies: public-sector labor unions, public health professionals, and state managers. The policy debates, legal, and political issues that emerge from this history suggest hopeful avenues for improving the dialogue and cooperation on the design and implementation of workplace smoking policies between and among public health professionals, managers, and labor union leaders in the United States. Understanding how these parties can reach agreement and work together may help tobacco control advocates and labor leaders join forces to enact future tobacco control policies. "

"Occupational and environmental health are dependent on the decisions made about the production of goods and services: the quality of our lives in the community and workplace and our well-being as workers, residents, and citizens are profoundly influenced by the technology employed in producing "our way of life." We seek to understand the system of decision making about the use of humans and the natural environment in production; we want to know who is sitting at the table where decisions are taken and what rives their decisions; and we want to know how ordinary people can take their appropriate place at the table, so that they can protect their health and well-being. The global economy is not what it seems: a mythology has been created about globalization in which the marketplace is the only reality and nations and national identity -human agency - play only a minor role. ..."

"The role of the private sector in funding academic research is increasing and the well-developed guidelines for government-sponsored research do not apply to the academic-industry arena. Good Practice Guidelines for privately funded occupational health research are necessary. Industry sponsors and academic researchers belong to differing systems with differing goals and means to achieve and evaluate them. As a result, problems are inherent in the relationship. Guidelines would benefit industry by providing criteria against which industry-funded research could be judged and evaluated. Guidelines would help university researchers assure their work is examined and critized on its merits. Such protection would foster quality research over the long term. "

"This paper examines the impact of violent crime on the working conditions, health, and security of bus drivers and bus conducters in the public transport system of Salvador, Brazil. The research included in-depth extensive interviews with workers, labor union officials, users, managers, and police. The typical social profile of offenders is as poor, unemployed youths, mostly without criminal records, seeking easy money mainly for leisure pursuits. Takes are minimal. We observed a pattern of bus robbery as a psychological power-game which for the bus workers, apart from physical injuries and fatalities, generates fear, identity conflicts, tense relations with users, and labor conflicts regarding the recuperation of stolen fares and worker and user security issues. We outline and evaluate the efficiency of security measures, including the use of lethal force by police. "