Contrary to previously announced plans, OSHA will not revoke all of the ancillary provisions in its Beryllium Standards for Construction and Shipyards. Beryllium is a strong, lightweight metal used in the aerospace, telecommunications, information technology, defense, medical, and nuclear industries. Workers who are exposed to beryllium – by inhaling or contacting it in the air or on surfaces - are at risk for developing beryllium disease and lung cancer.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is encouraging the drone community to help spread the word on drone safety with the first National Drone Safety Awareness Week taking place, Nov. 4-10, 2019. The FAA’s highest priority is to ensure the safety of the National Airspace System (NAS), and during National Drone Safety Awareness Week, the FAA reminds drone pilots and stakeholders that airspace safety is everyone’s responsibility.

National Employ Older Workers Week takes place the final week in September and recognizes the vital role of older workers [U.S. DOL 2019]. By 2020, workers aged 55 and over will likely make up about 25 percent of the U.S. workforce [BLS 2018]. Within the Wholesale and Retail Trade (WRT) Sector alone, in 2017 almost 4.5 million workers (more than 22 percent) are over age 55, up from 3.8 million workers in 2011 [BLS 2018].

For Kevin Emerick, workplace safety is no mere box to be checked on a To-Do List. It is about people. It is about family. It is about sending members of your work family home safe after each and every workday. “With the median tenure at our company at almost 25 years, we are family, and the last thing you want to see is someone in your family get hurt or worse,” said Emerick (shown above), risk manager for Woodfold Mfg., Inc., a Forest Grove, Oregon-based company that makes custom-crafted accordion doors, roll-up doors, and hardwood shutters.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is promising to share information about its efforts to ensure that proposed changes to the automated flight control system on the 737 MAX meet certification standards. The aircraft was taken out of service since the March 13, the second of two fatal crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people.

An electric arc has been identified by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) as the cause of a fire in the engine room aboard a fishing vessel – a blaze that put the crew’s lives at risk when they were unable to extinguish it. The four crew members of the Rose Marie, a 77-foot trawler 65 miles off the coast of Chatham, Massachusetts, abandoned ship and got into a life raft.

Does having close friends boost your self-esteem, or does having high self-esteem influence the quality of your friendships? Both, according to a meta-analysis of more than two decades of research, published by the American Psychological Association. "For the first time, we have a systematic answer to a key question in the field of self-esteem research: Whether and to what extent a person's social relationships influence his or her self-esteem development, and vice versa, and at what ages."

More than 1.8 million employees in France (some 10 percent of all workers) are exposed to at least one carcinogenic product on the job, according to a recent SUMER 2017 survey. SUMER is the acronym for the French “surveillance médicale des salariés aux risques professionnels”, i.e. the medical monitoring of employees’ exposure to occupational risks.

U.S. EPA requires eight California facilities to improve chemical safety Eight industrial facilities in California have reached a settlement with the EPA after the agency found they violated the federal Clean Air Act’s Chemical Accident Prevention regulations. EPA inspectors determined that the companies failed to: review and update facility Risk Management Plans; design and maintain safe facilities...

The National Transportation Safety Board has determined that Columbia Gas of Massachusetts’ deficiencies in management and oversight led to overpressurization of a natural gas distribution system which resulted in a series of fires and explosions in Merrimack Valley, Massachusetts.