Archive for March 23rd, 2011

March23

100 years after Triangle Shirtwaist Factory tragedy, corporations are still putting profit over safety

By: Rachel Lewis

This Friday marks the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company tragedy. On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out at the New York City garment factory. Even after 146 workers died, many of them young women who jumped to their deaths in an attempt to escape the engulfing flames, industry bristled at the thought of  implementing commonsense fire safety precautions.

They called sprinklers “cumbersome and costly.” They warned that the new laws would drive “manufacturers out of the city and state of New York.”

When sanitation certificates were proposed for bakeries, the president of the New York Flour Club said, “Such [sanitary] certificates will give a possible opportunity for an unfair person to make demands for graft on the small baker … [They] would have the effect of gradually reducing rather than increasing the number of small bakeries.”

Today, an assault on regulations that protect our health and safety, ensure a living wage and protect us from dangerous products is currently under way in Washington. Daily, Public Citizen pushes back against corporations seeking to roll back safeguards and block news ones, and fights for commonsense measures to protect against future tragedies.

Not surprisingly, corporations from BP to AIG to Massey Energy have similar reactions to the word “regulation.” But their cries about safeguards costing too much are flat wrong.

When we think of Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, it’s easy to picture it as an archaic snapshot of an era long gone. The suffering of that day is surely not the kind of suffering a sophisticated democratic nation like the United States would allow for, right? We like to think tragedies like this couldn’t happen here and we relish our cable news minute-to-minute updates on the Chilean miners. Yet today, the bodies of 45 miners trapped after a mine collapse in Pakistan were found. Preventable accidents are not just the stuff of other less developed nations though.

Public Citizen says,

Massey Energy is the Triangle Shirtwaist Company of today, similarly warning that the sky will fall if we institute safety rules for coal mining. If today’s House Republicans were alive in 1911, they would have called sprinklers “job killers.”

Soon, we will be marking the one-year anniversary of the Massey Energy mine disaster in West Virginia that left 29 miners dead. Accidents like these, alongside the BP Deep Water Horizon explosion and oil spill and the nuclear disaster in Japan, should be a  reminder that we need public protections.

 

Posted in: Consumer Protection, Health4 comments

March23

While Tokyo is running out of bottled water Americans are thinking twice about nuclear power

By: Rachel Lewis

Black smoke is billowing out of unit three of the Fukushima Daichii nuclear plant and the Japanese government has advised that infants not drink water in Tokyo after radiation tests showed levels twice the safe level yesterday, the Associated Press has reported.
The crisis in Japan has caused many Americans to think twice about nuclear power according to Reuters:

A poll of 814 U.S. adults released on Tuesday by the Civil Society Institute, which has been critical of nuclear energy, found that less than half of those questioned — 46 percent — said they support more nuclear power reactors in the United States and 44 percent oppose new reactors.

Furthermore, the AP quoted recently revised estimates from the Japanese government regarding the cost of the disaster:

The crisis is emerging as the world’s most expensive natural disaster on record, likely to cost up to $309 billion, according to a new government estimate. The death toll continued to rise, with more than 9,400 bodies counted and more than 14,700 people listed as missing.

As Public Citizen was quick to point out when some called the push for renewed debate on nuclear in the U.S. following the tragedy in Japan, if a nuclear accident were to happen here, the cost of cleanup could be crippling to our already overstretched economy. Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program, blogged about corporate liability parallels between the disaster in the Gulf, which victims have still not been adequately compensated for, and a catastrophe like Fukushima in the U.S.:

[T]the nuclear industry has a liability cap of $12.6 billion, thanks to the Price-Anderson Act. An individual corporation must pay only $375 million of that, with the balance shared by the industry. The nuclear industry likely will not voluntarily contribute additional money, as was the case with the BP escrow fund. After all, major oil companies like BP are far larger than even the biggest U.S. nuclear utility; in 2010, BP had revenues of $309 billion compared to $18.6 billion for Exelon, America’s largest operator of commercial nuclear reactors.

To read more from Tyson Slocum on this issue, please visit Truthout.

If you would like to call on the Obama administration to put an end to loan guarantees for nuclear energy companies and invest more in renewables, please sign our petition.

 

Posted in: Midmorning Refill, Nuclear Power, Uncategorized0 comments

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