The Serious Side Of Chocolate

(This post is part of Brave New Foundation's 16 Deaths Per Day campaign, where I am a blogger fellow.)

Back in July, a temp worker died from falling into a vat of chocolate. He had been on the job two weeks.

A temp worker at a Camden chocolate processing plant died this morning after he fell into an eight-foot vat that was mixing and melting chocolate to be used in Hershey's candy.

Vincent Smith II, 29, of Camden, was standing atop a platform and tossing blocks of solid, raw chocolate into the tank, Jason Laughlin, spokesman for the Camden County Prosecutor's Office, said.

The tank was heated at 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and paddles inside stirred the chocolate as it was thrown in.

When Smith fell around 10:30 a.m., one of his three coworkers on the platform immediately rushed to turn the machine off and the two others tried to pull him out.

But Smith had been struck by one of the paddles, suffering fatal injuries. He was pronounced dead at the scene, and Camden firefighters pulled his chocolate-covered body out of the tank.

A few local newscasts in the Philadelphia area had some fun with this story, barely suppressing giggles and making predictable puns as they gave it a brief mention.

But they never followed up on the story. In fact, the owners of the plant, Lyons & Sons, never had a license to make chocolate (yes that's a Fox news link):

Officials say a cocoa processing center in New Jersey was operating illegally when a worker fell into a vat of melting chocolate and died.

Camden cited Lyons & Sons Inc. for not having a business license after Vincent Smith II died Wednesday.

Authorities say the 29-year-old was hit by a mixing paddle.

Company spokesman Kevin Feeley says that it's a misunderstanding and that Camden officials knew the firm was operating in the former Campbell Soup plant.

I'm sure the company spokesman would call it a misunderstanding.

The lack of a license - after "six or seven" years of operation, according to the initial story - may explain why Lyons & Sons didn't have any prior OSHA violations. Hard to investigate businesses when they aren't carrying licenses and the city inspectors don't know of their plant's existence, making them unable to refer problems to OSHA. In fact, the plant was never zoned for melting chocolate, but cocoa-bean storage. And Lyons & Sons actually was contracted through a company called Cocoa Services (presumably so one could blame the oversights on the other). And John Lyons was listed as the President of both businesses.

Ultimately, one business is really culpable here. Hershey doesn't make their own chocolate anymore. They sub-contract it out to companies like Lyons & Sons to cut costs. Included in those cost savings are worker benefits - and worker safety.

Nancy Cleeland wrote about Smith's story in October for The American Prospect.

Safety is of particular concern in food-processing plants, which often feature slick floors, powerful machinery, and raised platforms. Any one of those features can be deadly. Falls are the second leading cause of death on the job in the U.S., after highway accidents, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even as the overall occupational death rate has dropped, the toll from falls has been steadily rising for 15 years -- with 847 reported fatalities in 2007.

"In many of these plants you have bits of food flying everywhere, and it gets on the floor," says Jackie Nowell, occupational safety and health director of the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW), which represents workers in beef- and poultry-processing plants, among others. "That makes it very dangerous. Employers struggle with this issue all the time. And it's a very big concern for workers."

Worries about safety have driven many organizing campaigns and contract negotiations in food processing. Unions representing workers in the industry invest in health and safety research and advocacy and include safety language in contracts. "There's a great history of it," Nowell says. "I've got old contracts from the '40s that talk about safety committees. It was important that there be a system that workers could go through. They learned to look for hazards and felt comfortable reporting them."

But without job security or the support of a union, temp workers are seldom forthcoming with their concerns, she adds. And when accidents do happen, the victim's interests sometimes languish as blame is passed around. "There has to be a better definition of who's the employer," Nowell says. "There has to be a closing of the loop."

Understand the circumstances surrounding Smith's death. He lived in Camden, one of the most economically depressed cities in America. He had been looking for a job for months and was praying for one, according to family. So when the opportunity to work at the chocolate factory came around, he took it. He was getting just over the minimum wage, with no benefits, sick days, or even the promise of a future job, as a temporary employee. And worker safety was far less stringent on a non-union plant of contractors like Lyons & Sons.

In this case, OSHA is investigating, and Lyons & Sons have shut the illegal production facility down. But how many other factories are out there, beyond the reach of OSHA, operating in violation of current law, and unwilling to do anything about it because the risks from federal regulators are so minimal?

That's why we need the Protect America's Workers Act to give workers like Vincent Smith more protections. Death by chocolate may sound funny, but it's no laughing matter.

16 Deaths Per Day

(Disclosure: I am a blogger fellow with Brave New Films, the creator of this video and the 16 Deaths Per Day campaign)



Every day in America, 16 people die at work from employer negligence.

That's the backdrop to 16 Deaths Per Day, a new video and website from the advocacy group Brave New Films, seeking to highlight the often-neglected issue of worker safety.

The video makes the point that employers who provide an unsafe work environment are almost never prosecuted in the event of a death of an employee. Even if they were, the crime of contributing to an employee's death is only a misdemeanor, with a maximum prison sentence of six months and a maximum fine of $70,000. Under the Bush Administration, the Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) hardly ever referred cases to the Justice Department for prosecution, lowered fines for noncompliance so that they represented a minor cost of doing business, and underfunded the agency so it could never inspect worksites across America for unsafe conditions. In addition, OSHA protections currently do not apply to all public employees at the state or federal level.

The video takes a look at the stories of several workers. Travis Koehler-Fergen, an employee at the Orleans Hotel in Las Vegas, and Tina Hall, from Toyo Automotive Parts USA, both died at their workplaces in accidents. The Orleans was found by OSHA to have broken the law, but were never referred for prosecution. 16 safety violations were found at the Toyo plant prior to the accident that killed Tina Hall, but the highest fine ever levied on the company was $7,000.

Members of Congress, including Lynn Woolsey and the late Ted Kennedy, introduced a bill this April called the Protecting America's Workers Act, which would tighten up worker safety laws, and give OSHA the ability to impose legitimate fines on noncompliant work sites, making the law adequate to deal with serious violators. Among other things, the bill would:

• Expand workplace protections to state, county, municipal, and federal employees who are not currently covered by the Occupational Safety and Health Act
• Increase financial penalties for those who kill or endanger workers
• Strengthen criminal penalties to make felony charges available for willful negligence causing death or serious injury
• Expand OSHA coverage to millions of other employees who fall through the cracks (like airline and railroad workers)
• Provide protection for whistleblowers
• Give employees the right to refuse hazardous work that may kill them
• Improve the rights of workers and families, requiring OSHA to investigate all cases of death
• Prohibit employers from discouraging reporting of injury or illness

16 Deaths Per Day has a petition for members of the relevant House and Senate committees, urging them to pass this bill. There's a Facebook page as well.

McCain's Fabulous Life, Day 2

McCain's house gaffe made probably every major paper this morning, and was featured on every nightly newscast. A good example is this USA Today piece, featuring one of the best paragraphs ever:

McCain, who has portrayed Obama as an elitist, is the son and grandson of admirals. The Associated Press estimates his wife, a beer heiress, is worth $100 million. Obama was raised by a single mother who relied at times on food stamps, and went to top schools on scholarships and loans. His income has increased from book sales since he spoke at the 2004 Democratic convention.

Hilarious. Among the other developments: the DNC put out a funny video asking random folks if they remember how many houses they own:



Josh Marshall notices that the McCain household staff budget went up 50% last year to $273,000 a year. Inflation's tough for everybody.

And even a fount of conventional wisdom like Chris Cillizza gets why this matters:

In politics, there is nothing worse than appearing out of touch.

From time immemorial, a candidate who is effectively portrayed as forgetting about the "little" people, of having "gone Washington," of living higher on the hog than voters, loses.

Class remains a powerful motivator for many voters in the country. Politicians are forever trying to cast their candidacies as closely rooted in the communities from which they sprung -- a purposeful attempt to ensure that voters know that the candidate "understands the problems of people like you." Put simply: The worst thing you can call a politician is an elitist.

And so, seen through that lens, it makes perfect sense why Democrats have picked up on John McCain's comment that he wasn't sure about how many houses he and his wife own -- comments made to Politico's Mike Allen and J-Mart -- and why Republicans have fought back so quickly and so hard.

By the way, the progressive movement needs to take a little credit for this one. We harped on McCain's comment at the Saddleback Forum that $5 million dollars connoted being rich, which Obama connected to the current controversy yesterday. Brave New Films and the AFL-CIO have teamed up to drive the "McCain is the real elitist" angle hard, and they put a video out on Wednesday about his many houses. That clearly prompted the Politico writers to ask the question to McCain, leading to that priceless moment.

And I have to say the Obama new media team has been very solid on this in providing information. This is what can happen when everyone works together.

...I forgot to mention the 9-car entourage to Starbucks for a latte yesterday. McCain is not doing himself any favors. And of course this is ticky-tack, but as I've constantly said, this is how the media works in the modern age, and anyway McCain started this whole "elitist" thing, and being out of touch with what's happening in the world and the economy actually does matter.

YouTube Ad Roundup

(Just to clarify; BNF did not do the Schwarzenegger clip, it was a group of CA bloggers. And I think the idea is to depress fundraising for signature gathering by suggesting that the measure has no hope of winning. Arnold's already trashed the idea but is hiding behind saying "I haven't read it." I think it's also as much about lowing ARNOLD'S favorables by highlighting this weasel technique. Given all that, I think your analysis still stands. -dday)

I've had my doubts about some of the efficacy of the citizen viral video campaigns. The Brave New Films YouTube ad asking Schwarzenegger to weigh in on the Republican electoral vote grabbing initiative is a case in point.

First, the ad:



Having a Simpsons clip to illustrate your point is a polemicist's dream. But the music (which sounds familiar from other Greenwald productions) is odd and poorly looped over the material.

But more importantly, the concept itself is of questionable value. First, the ad focuses on the fact that Schwarzenegger hasn't yet commented upon Republican efforts to reconfigure California's electoral college allotment system. Schwarzenegger is stalling for time, saying he can't comment because he hasn't read the initiative. The ad shows an insert with a picture of file boxes containing copies of the bill sent by individual Californians asking Schwarzenegger to read the initiative, and collected by the Courage Campaign.

First: this is not a bill Schwarzenegger will have to sign into law or veto. This is an initiative for Californians to vote for or against.

Which introduces the question: who cares what Schwarzenegger thinks?

Clearly it would help foes of the initiative for a (supposedly) moderate Republican to say bad things about it. Those who hope to defeat this effort to redraw the entire country's electoral college map and hand the 2008 Presidential campaign to the Republican candidate should seize any tools to hand.

But is this a good one? Is Schwarzenegger (a) a uniquely important lever in the debate, who is (b) likely to say something useful to the cause? I'd say the answers are probably: (a) Yes; (b) No.

But even if it is worth the effort to try to extract a comment from Schwarzenegger in the hopes he'll say something that will help paint this initiative as too viciously partisan for Schwarzenegger to endorse, is this the right means to that end?

If your goal was to stage a media event highlighting the fact that Schwarzenegger was slow in reading a bill, why deliver boxes filled with thousands of copies of the same bill? Wouldn't it be better to rent a billboard with the text of the bill (prohibitively expensive) or make a giant banner with the text of the ad and hang it near the capitol?

Now for some praise.

Brave New Films's The Real Rudy project has produced the best citizen advocacy ad to date.

This latest in a series is a master class on how it's done:






Note first the quiet, unobtrusive music opening onto the now-iconic images of Rudy, covered in soot, walking through the streets of New York City after the collapse of the World Trade Center.

And then the various talking heads take us into the entire reason Rudy was left to stride the streets of New York in the first place that fateful day: he had located the command center in WTC 7. He was on the streets with his aides because his choice to site the command center - destroyed in the attacks - left him with no office.

The hits keep coming: how many lives could have been saved had firemen and police officers had effective communication from a central clearinghouse. How many advisers Rudy overruled in siting the center within walking distance of City Hall.

Such images of soot-covered Rudy should become as toxic to the campaign as the air at Ground Zero turned out to be.

This video goes a long way toward its goal - which is to undermine a candidate's best iconographic material such that he hesitates to use it.

Bravo.

The Real Rudy

Somebody had to make this movie (and actually, somebody did; it's called Giuliani Time), and Brave New Films has released their first installment of The Real Rudy, detailing Giuliani's record as mayor and not the hype. Combined with the International Association of Fire Fighters video "Urban Legend," the truth about Rudy is out there. For those in the reality-based community, it's not the social issues or the stance on guns that spells Giuliani's downfall: it's his judgment.



This one's about the decision to put the emergency operations center in the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center, the only area where terrorists had attacked in New York City. Due to this enormous error, emergency communications were severed and fire fighters never got the message to evacuate the soon-to-fall South Tower. It's a devastating piece.

The Iraq Memorial

Since it's Iraq Day here, I thought I'd bring you The Iraq Memorial, a project of Brave New Films, set to coincide with the 4ht anniversary of the beginning of the war - that's right, it's longer than WWII now. This is an important piece for people to see and to understand the true cost of this conflict: the cost to their fellow Americans who are simply doing their job but are put in terrible, unwinnable circumstances. It's a fitting tribute.




By the way, Iraq is full-on rioting right now (and these are the group who's side we are taking in this Pentagon-acknowledged civil war, the ones chanting "No, no to America, no no to Israel" in the streets). Americans nationwide will be marching tomorrow. When the nation's political leaders will take a stand is anybody's guess.