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From the Department of Labor:

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“The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) is publishing its draft Environmental Justice Strategy in response to the Memorandum of Understanding with the Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice (EJ IWG) signed in August 2011. President Obama has renewed agencies’ environmental justice planning by reinvigorating Executive Order 12898 (EO 12898), which tasked Cabinet-level Federal agencies with making environmental justice part of their mission. The agencies were directed to identify and address, as appropriate, the disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of their programs, policies, and activities on minority and low-income populations.

The Department views Environmental Justice from a workplace training, health and safety perspective. The Department is developing an Environmental Justice Strategy that is in line with the mission of the Department and Secretary Solis’ vision for the future: good jobs for everyone. The vision of good jobs for everyone includes ensuring that workplaces are safe and healthy; helping workers who are in low-wage jobs or out of the labor market find a path into middle-class jobs; and helping middle-class families remain in the middle-class. The Department’s draft Environmental Justice Strategy focuses on agencies involved with worker training (the Employment Training Administration (ETA) and the Office of Recovery for Automotive Communities and Workers (ORACW)), health and safety issues (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA)), as well as agencies responsible for data collection (the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)) and workers’ compensation for certain injuries caused by environmental hazards (Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs (OWCP)). As part of our development of the DOL Environmental Justice Strategy, we are soliciting public comment.

Your input is important to us. Please read the draft strategy and respond to the thought questions on the left side of this page. Please consider the spectrum of DOL programs, policies, grants, enforcement actions, or regulations when providing responses. Please provide responses that are supported with specific examples and data, where possible.”

http://dolenvironmentaljustice.ideascale.com/