Synergist - March 2011

interviews with Alexandra Berzon of the Las Vegas Sun, who received a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on CityCenter construction; Congressman George Miller, former chair of the House of Representatives Education and Labor Committee; and families of deceased workers.

CityCenter, located on the Las Vegas strip, is the largest privately funded construction project in the U.S. Round-the-clock construction of CityCenter began in 2007. By June 2008, when construction workers walked off the job, six CityCenter workers had been killed on the site. The striking workers demanded and were granted additional safety training and full access to the site for union officials.

In May 2009, Berzon gave the Upton Sinclair Memorial Lecture at AIHce in Toronto, Ontario.

Cost of Construction is in production and is not yet scheduled for release.

Technological, Scientific Advances Key to Protecting Workers, Suggests UMass Lowell Report In January, University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Center for Sustainable Protection published a report that analyzes the suc-cesses and failures of occupational health and safety regulations over the past 40 years. “Lessons Learned: Solutions for Workplace Safety and Health” suggests that despite efforts by

OSHA and other workplace health and safety regulatory agencies, workers are not as safe as they could be and worker protections are not on par with the technological and scientific developments made by OSHA. The report concludes that many occupational injuries and illnesses could be prevented if toxic chemicals, production processes and technologies were created with worker health and safety in mind.

“We found that ineffective workplace health and safety protections are the result of conflicts between agencies, lack of worker participation in decision-making processes, the politi-cization of science and the conflicts between economic and political interests,” says Professor David Kriebel, chair of the UMass Lowell Department of Work Environment and lead author of the report, in a Feb. 4 UMass Lowell e-News article.

The report recommends several policies for enhancing the safety of the workplace and health of workers, including promoting prevention through design, expanding labor/migrant labor safety and health protections, increasing occupational safety and health surveillance, and instituting a workplace health and safety program that stresses injury and illness prevention and worker participation.