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A worker at a Pennsylvania sugar plant died buried alive in sugar in an accident that could have been prevented by a safety device removed just 13 days earlier, a ProPublica investigation finds. Janio Salinas—a 50-year-old who, like every other employee in the CSC Sugar warehouse in Fairless Hills, was a temp worker—died after climbing inside a huge hopper to remove sugar clogs on February 25, 2013. The warehouse manager told the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that he had asked for a safety screen to prevent such an accident, but after one was installed, the plant manager decided to...

My mother is sixty something and anxiously counting down the days till she could retire her nurses uniform for good. She's been working consistently for 40 years, and when she speaks of retiring I can sense relief still mixed with a bit of anxiety. The sense of relief is obvious, but it boggles me that after 40 years of dedicated work, rarely calling in sick and in fact winning awards for her diligence and treatment of patients, that my mother is still concerned about whether or not she will be financially secure once she calls it quits. I see the...

Amy McGraw doesn't want us to get the wrong impression of her daughter, Rebecca Leahy. The recent graduate of Cypress Bay High School in Weston, Fla., works hard -- really hard, in school, on her dance team and beyond. But after Leahy found a summer retail job at the mall, she told her new boss she wasn't available to work on Wednesdays. "It's a different mentality from when I was her age," McGraw said. "She has nothing scheduled on Wednesdays. She wanted time to go to the beach and shopping with her friends. I was wondering if that comes from...

Doctors at the Philadelphia Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Regional Office are sitting around with nothing to do, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of U.S. veterans continue to wait for medical appointments. “Urgent! Need work for In-house Physicians,” wrote the Office’s assistant veterans service center manager Ameen Khabir in the subject line of a June 19 email to colleagues, which he placed on “High” importance. The Regional Office is responsible for processing compensation, benefits, employment and insurance claims. More than 276,000 veteran benefit claims across the country are still backlogged, having been waiting for more than 125 days....

Haters could be characterised as less active because they do fewer things as people with a positive attitude. But they could also be characterised as more focused because they spend more time on the small number of tasks. ‘The present results demonstrate that patterns of general action may occur for reasons other than the desire to be active versus inactive,’ the researchers wrote. ‘Indeed, some people may be more active than others not because they want to be active per se, but because they identify a large number of specific behaviours in which they want to engage.’ The findings may...

Cue up the song: Life Styles of the Rich and Famous!Our beloved fearless leader goes to Pittsburgh today to speak about the economy, or something.  So, we here at FR appreciate his difficult task he is performing for the American people.  As immigrant children flood our border, we turn yellow and run from our commitments abroad, use the IRS to attack those 'nattering nabobs of negativity' AKA Tea Baggers- er Tea Party enemies- er citizens and stonewall those bothersome Fox News inspired low down dirty Republicans on those idiotic committees, it naturally TIME FOR GOLF.  And as such, from now...

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has filed a lawsuit on behalf of three former employees, against a Syosset, New York company claiming that workers were forced to participate in religious activities at work and fired if they refused. As reported by Reuters, United Health Programs of America and its parent company, Cost Containment Group, made employees pray, thank God for their jobs, and tell managers and colleagues, “I love you.” The practice followed a belief system called “Onionhead,” which was a doctrine created by the aunt of the company’s owner. The EEOC press release says other activities “…included...

Flu experts have made a mutant version of the 1918 “Spanish flu” virus that killed tens of millions of people, sparking a new debate over whether such work is too dangerous. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin says the experiments are important for helping scientists understand how new pandemics start, and for designing better flu vaccines.

A brain professor is taking the concept of flexible work hours to an absolutely new level. Vincent Walsh, professor of human brain research at University College London, has said that employees should be permitted to take short naps at work in order to boost their productivity, reports Daily Mail. Sleeping is vital for memory and learning, adds Professor Hugh Piggins, of Manchester University’s circadian neurobiology lab. The sleep experts revealed in their study that it is only after the Industrial Revolution that people have been obsessed with squeezing all their sleep requirement into one slot. However, they claim that afternoon...

University of Minnesota public affairs professor Morris Kleiner has written extensively on the topic of occupational licensing and has been featured before on CD here and here, and by Jimmy P here. Among his key findings: 1. Occupational licensing drives up costs to consumers. Licensed workers earn 15% more on average than their unlicensed counterparts in other states. Across the U.S. economy, occupational licensing adds at least $116 billion a year to the cost of services.2. For several occupations that are regulated in some states but not others (e.g. librarians, nutritionists and respiratory therapists), employment growth for those professions was...

Academia is hell. In the latest higher-education fad, students want "trigger warnings," according to The New York Times. It appears that some students are so fragile that they want university staff to protect them from big bad ideas. Students around the country say they want "explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans." An Oberlin College draft -- now "under revision" -- for trigger warnings suggested faculty "be aware of racism,...

and revitalize Camp Naco gained state-wide recognition this week when it was named one of the recipients of the Governor’s Heritage Preservation Honor Award. “I’ve been working on this project for about 15 years. It’s been slow and difficult, and there’s been some real discouraging times. About once a year I’m ready to give up and then something nice happens like this to keep us growing,” said Becky Orozco of the Naco Heritage Alliance. Orozco, along with fellow alliance members Bill Doelle and Deborah Swartzwelder, has worked for years to preserve and rehabilitate the structures populating several acres of land...

I've commented before about the way in which America's teachers paint themselves as the hardest working, most pathetically abused people in America. In 2011, I noted that today's teachers work fewer hours and are paid more than my dad's generation of teachers, but the latter didn't whine all the time. Last year, I posited a reason for the unusual deference teachers get, and it's not because they're the overworked saints of their own heated imaginations: At National Review, Jason Richwine points out that this martyrdom shtick benefits them in intangible ways, and is the flip side of the disdain with...

Here's a statstic that, taken by itself, doesn't really say much. More American are recieving government assistance for food via the SNAP program (formerly known as food stamps) than there are women working full time. CNS: In the average month of 2012, according to the Department of Agriculture, there were 46,609,000 people participating in the food stamp program (formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). That contrasts with the 44,059,000 women who worked full-time, year-round in 2012, according to the Census Bureau’s report on Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States. For each woman who worked...

Most Americans love to reminisce about their first paying job, whether it was scooping ice cream, babysitting, or working behind a retail counter. It was rarely glamorous, but earning that first paycheck was a point of pride and marked a milestone in a teenager's life. By the time Andrew Sum entered his teenage years, he'd already held a job delivering newspapers. Now as an economist, one of his chief concerns is the state of the labor market for today's teenagers. The employment rates for teenagers, ages 16 to 19, plummeted from 45 percent in 2000 to just 26 percent in...

If you live in certain buildings in New York City, you get to know your doorman. The weekend guy in my building, Gene, knew I was a business reporter, and on Saturday he asked me what his son should study when he starts City College next year. (City College, by the way, remains the primary option — and a stellar one — for advanced higher ed in New York for the children of what remains of New York's working class.) Anyway, off the top of my head, I was at a loss. I mostly cover energy, an area that obviously...

A lot of Internet ink has been spilled over how lazy and entitled Millennials are, but when it comes to paying for a college education, work ethic isn't the limiting factor. The economic cards are stacked such that today’s average college student, without support from financial aid and family resources, would need to complete 48 hours of minimum-wage work a week to pay for his courses—a feat that would require superhuman endurance, or maybe a time machine. To take a close look at the tuition history of almost any institution of higher education in America is to confront an unfair...

When the manager of a Michigan gas station failed to show up for work on time, her third-shift employee did what any of us would do; he left an angry note on the door, locked up and went home. Okay, most of us would never do it. But how awesome was it that he did?  The BP manager, who declined to be named, said she was running “30 minutes late” because she slept through her alarm. The tardy manager also said she was surprised that “Joe” left the note on the door instead of calling her before leaving the store.

Pope to Italian Steel Workers: work is essential for human dignity, should be available to all (Vatican Radio) Pope Francis has reaffirmed that employment is essential to society, families, and individuals and for the dignity of the human person. In a Vatican audience Thursday for staff and families of the Italian Steel Works company “Acciaierie di Terni” celebrating its 130th anniversary, Pope Francis said his thoughts were directed not only to their company and others in the region, but to “all of the working world.” In the current economic climate and the difficulties facing the work environment, the Pope said,...

Most commentators viewed the February jobs report released on March 7 as good news, indicating that the labor market is on a favorable growth path. A more careful reading shows that employment actually fell—as it has in four out of the past six months and in more than one-third of the months during the past two years. Although it is often overlooked, a key statistic for understanding the labor market is the length of the average workweek. Small changes in the average workweek imply large changes in total hours worked. The average workweek in the U.S. has fallen to 34.2...