Law360 reports that the Senate Commerce Committee last week unanimously approved Mark. R. Rosekind, President Barack Obama’s nominee to lead the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a week after the nominee assured the panel that he would restore the agency’s tarnished reputation following the General Motors Co. and Takata Corp. recalls. Rosekind has said he would boost efforts to catch automakers that don’t report safety defects and to enforce recalls.
Why McDonald’s says it wants to be in the schools
If McDonald’s has its way, reports CBS MoneyWatch the three R’s might end up being reading, writing and Ronald McDonald. That’s because the fast-food giant is planning to refocus on marketing to children and families in response to a serious problem on its plate. Thanks to changing tastes, the fast-food chain has suffered seven straight months of declining U.S. sales, with parents increasingly opting for rivals’ seemingly healthier meals.
Exposed: Decades of Denial on Poisons
Last week, The Center for Public Integrity announced that it was joining with Columbia University and City University of New York to make public some 20,000 pages of benzene documents — the inaugural collection in Exposed: Decades of denial on poisons, an archive of previously secret oil and chemical industry memoranda, emails, letters, presentations and meeting minutes. Hundreds of thousands of additional documents on different chemicals will be added in 2015 and beyond. To find out more about Exposed, Corporations and Health Watch director Nicholas Freudenberg interviewed one of its founders, Gerald Markowitz, CUNY Distinguished Professor of History and Public Health.
CHW: What led you and your colleagues to create this new resource for scholars, journalists and activists?
GM: Over the past 20 to 25 years David Rosner (Ronald Lauterstein Professor of History at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health) and I have been using the private records of corporations that have been obtained through discovery procedures in legal cases. These include hundreds of thousands of documents from the chemical industry, the lead industry, the silica industry among others, which we have used in our books and articles. For many years we have worked with Merlin Chowkwanyun, currently a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who will be an assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia next year. In addition to his extraordinary talents as a scholar, Chowkwanyun is knowledgeable about how to make masses of documents available and searchable for researchers. Together we realized that these documents could be used to tell multiple stories and thus they could be a tremendous resource for scholars, journalists, students and activists.
CHW: How do you think a resource like this can contribute to a better understanding of the impact of corporations on health?
GM: These are internal corporate documents that often hold information found nowhere else. This is an opportunity for people to understand not only the effects of corporate actions on health, but also the thinking within corporations about how and why they take the actions they do. It also provides us with the opportunity to examine secret studies that corporations have conducted on a variety of products and substances as well as their attempts to influence government activities and public perceptions of their products.
CHW: Why did you decide to partner with the Center on Public Integrity, an investigative journalism organization?
GM: It is crucial that information that is in these documents gets to as broad a public and scholarly community as possible. CPI has a rich and distinguished history of examining and analyzing a wide range of public health, occupational and environmental issues and has been very successful in getting its stories into the public arena.
CHW: How can students in public health, history and other disciplines use this resource?
GM: This resource is open to the public and we hope that it will provide the basis of many masters theses, PhD dissertations, and articles.
CHW: What future do you see for this database? Are you hoping that it will include documents from other industries?
GM: We are just at the beginning of developing this database. As time goes on we will be expanding and refining the search engine so that users will be able to make use of it in many creative and productive ways. In addition, although right now we only have the benzene documents on line, in the coming months we will be adding a wide range of other industry documents, including those of the chemical industry, the asbestos industry, the silica industry and the lead industry among others.
See the following CPI reports based on documents in Exposed:
Benzene and worker cancers: ‘An American tragedy’
Internal documents reveal industry ‘pattern of behavior’ on toxic chemicals
New battlefront for petrochemical industry: benzene and childhood leukemia
Draft Regulations Ban Smoking in Public Places in China
Anti-tobacco advocates welcomed a new draft national smoking control regulations for public places, reports China Daily, but said the rules could still be strengthened. The draft by the National Health and Family Planning Commission was published on the website of the Legislative Affairs Office of the State Council, pending public consultation. It would ban smoking in public places and also ban all forms of tobacco advertising, sponsorship and promotion of tobacco products, as well as certain smoking scenes in films and TV shows.
Gaps in FDA’s Antibiotics Policy
In December 2013, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration took steps to eliminate the use of antibiotics in food animals for growth promotion. It asked drug companies to remove indications for “feed efficiency” and “weight gain” from labels of antibiotic products and require veterinarians to oversee addition of these drugs to feed and water. The new policy is intended to reduce antibiotic misuse, which contributes to the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. A new report from the Pew Charitable Trust examines gaps in FDA policy that may allow some harmful practices to persist.
Gun Industry Divestment Campaign
Cross posted from Santa Barbara Coalition Against Gun Violence
Please join the Coalition Against Gun Violence (CAGV) in a Campaign to Divest the University of California system of its holdings in the gun manufacturing industry.
In the wake of the May 23, 2014, tragedy in Isla Vista, California, the University of California Santa Barbara community, Campaign to Unload, and CAGV have come together to turn grief into action. Along with students, faculty and alumni we are demanding action from the University of California: Transparency of its $88 billion endowment and a ban on all future investments in the gun industry.
The UC community deserves to know whether its institution is helping to fund gun violence; and the governing board of the University of California has a moral obligation to take a clear stance against investing in the gun industry that continues to endanger the UC community and the nation.
The Regents of the University of California must stand with UCSB and fight to prevent more senseless tragedy by pledging it will not invest in gun violence.
• PLEDGE TO STAND WITH UCSB to demand that UC Regents adopt a gun-free endowment: http://www.campaign2unload.org/pledge-to-stand-with-uc-santa-barbara-and-say-not-one-more/
• SIGN THE PETITION to tell the University of California Board Of Regents to take a clear stance against investing in gun violence: http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/university-of-california-1
• LEARN MORE ABOUT DIVESTMENT and the Campaign to Unload. Start a Campaign in your City or on your Campus: http://www.campaign2unload.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Divestment-Toolkit_UCSB.pdf
Worried about impact on industry, Japan may expand air bag recalls
Honda Motor and Mazda Motor may have to recall another 200,000 cars in Japan to replace Takata Corp air bags if Takata complies with a U.S. order to recall cars across the United States rather than just in humid regions, reports Japan Today. Several automakers in the U.S. have issued regional recalls of certain models to investigate what is causing some Takata air bags to explode with excessive force. U.S. safety regulators have ordered Takata to have those recalls expanded nationwide.
Alcohol abuse costing Britain £6 billion a year
Alcohol abuse could be costing the United Kingdom up to £6 billion a year in NHS bills, premature death, losses to business and drink-related crimes and accidents, reported The Daily Mail. A study by the Royal College of Physicians said drink-related health problems could account for up to 12% of total NHS spending on hospitals, about £3 billion. Campaigners said that with the estimated £3 billion lost through absenteeism, unemployment, premature deaths and alcohol-related crimes and accidents the total cost of excessive drinking is £6 billion.
Walmart’s Hunger Games: How America’s Largest How America’s Largest Employer and Richest Family Worsen the Hunger Crisis
re-posted from EatDrinkPolitics
In the United States, 49 million individuals suffer from hunger, including 15.8 million children. In the last three years, the number of participants in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly called food stamps) grew by 42% to more than 47 million Americans. The growth in SNAP eligibility is not just due to people who can’t find work, but also because many people are under- employed or in jobs where they are paid too little to cover their own food costs.
The hunger crisis in the United States is the result of larger economic factors at play. Today, income inequality is at its highest levels since the 1920s. While corporate profits are reaching record levels, the majority of American families are working harder for less and average wages are at the lowest point since 1948.
Men and women are looking for fair pay for their hard work, but low wages, erratic scheduling and involuntary part-timing are keeping them from supporting their families, including putting a warm dinner on the table at night.
At Walmart – our country’s largest employer – too many workers are unable to provide food for their families because they are paid poverty wages and cannot get full-time, consistent hours.
Walmart and the Walton family are at the center of a profit-building empire that allows them to build their wealth off of workers’ inability to afford food.
In addition to paying workers so little that too many rely on public assistance, Walmart and the Waltons are building their wealth with income from food stamps.
And while Walmart and the Waltons often tout their anti-hunger charities, this giving, through its huge public relations push, shifts the conversation away from addressing the larger food insecurity issues the corporation and its owners are creating.
The conversation they want to avoid is how Walmart and the Waltons have helped to create the hunger crisis in America. They also have the ability – more than any other business – to lift hundreds of thousands of working families out of poverty by improving jobs at its stores, which would, in turn, reduce hunger across the nation.
Walmart Sets the Standard for Low- Pay in Retail and the Economy
A close look at the causes of hunger in America shows the overlap with the symptoms of the Walmart economy. And that is no coincidence.
In the U.S. today, the fastest growing job sector is low-wage retail jobs, with one in every 10 retail employees working at Walmart. With its size and reach nationwide, Walmart’s pay and other practices set the standard for the retail industry and drive down pay in other industries as well.
Estimates of hourly Walmart wages vary, but one study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that Walmart cashiers average just $8.48/hour, while another industry report found the average pay to be $8.818 per hour. At this rate, an employee who works 34 hours per week, which is Walmart’s definition of full-time, is paid $15,500 per year, which is about $8,000 below the federal poverty line for a family of four.
Walmart has confirmed that the company pays the majority of its workers less than $25,000 a year. As a result, many Walmart workers are at or near the federal poverty line and are unable to feed and clothe their families and provide basic necessities for their children.
Walmart’s Systematic Part-Timing Keeps Take Home Pay Low
Since 2006, the retail and wholesale sector has cut one million full-time jobs while adding 500,000 part-time jobs. As many as 600,000 Walmart workers currently work part-time, although many want to work full-time and are pushing for additional hours. The company intensified its hiring of temporary workers last year, while continuing to deny full-time hours to many employees who want them.
Read more on Walmart’s Hunger Games
Jay Leno Cancels SHOT Show Appearance
After Jay Leno cancelled his appearance at the firearms industry 2015 SHOT Show State of the Industry Dinner, the National Sports Shooting Foundation, a gun industry trade group, issued a statement: “we are clearly disappointed by Jay Leno’s decision … He unilaterally cancelled his promised appearance due to pressure from the anti-gun lobby, which included false statements about our industry and its commitment to genuine firearms safety, which we attempted to personally correct with him, but to no avail… (We are not) unfamiliar with the bullying political tactics of the gun control groups that seem to have as little respect for the First Amendment as they continually demonstrate with regard to the Second Amendment.”
Corporations and Health Watch 