The US experience echoes that in Australia, where a government energy efficiency home insulation programme saw a spate of injuries and deaths in workers employed by get rich quick non-union contractors. In the UK, concerns have been raised about fatalities in wind farm construction and the notoriously deadly recycling industry.

In the US, online news agency FairWarning reported in October 2010 that authorities in California alone investigated three workplace deaths in the solar panel industry in slightly over two years. Installing solar panels combines three of the most hazardous jobs — roofing, carpentry and electrical work — with work at height, making it particularly risky.

Wind power, too, has its risks. ‘The dark side of solar and wind power projects’, a 3 August 2011 report in the Los Angeles Times, points out that many technicians on wind power projects work in bathroom-size spaces, high above the ground, surrounded by high-voltage electrical equipment. Workers also sometimes inspect turbine blades while suspended alongside them, on sites whipped by strong winds. The result: technicians have fallen hundreds of feet, and others have been crushed by, or trapped in, moving machinery.

The Times adds that the risks go beyond the manufacture and installation phase. It reports the complicated wiring under solar panels has left some firefighters so bewildered they have allowed residential rooftops to burn. Some panels contain materials such as cadmium and selenium, which could be explosive or carcinogenic, according to the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition.

While watchdog groups say the existing state and federal regulations are inadequate to protect workers, wind and solar energy industry trade associations say they are offering, or developing, safety recommendations.

The US federal health and safety regulator, OSHA, remains concerned. But OSHA is facing its own battle for survival. As budget cuts to federal agencies appear inevitable as a consequence of the debt deal agreed by Congress, safety enforcement in any workplace, green or otherwise, could itself be in danger.

According to a report in the online magazine In These Times, OSHA has no fat to trim, with a current budget of only $558.6 million. “Many public health and safety advocates say that that figure doesn’t leave OSHA with the resources needed to adequately inspect workplaces. There are only 2,218 inspectors at both the federal and state level who inspect 7.3 million workplaces employing more than 135 million workers (that’s one inspector for every 57,984 workers.)”

The article concludes: “At this rate, OSHA can inspect a workplace on average once every 129 years and state OSHA inspectors could inspect one every 67 years. For a country the size of the United States, health and safety experts say you need at least 12,000 inspectors, six times more inspectors than OSHA currently has, in order to properly inspect America’s workplaces.”

While traditional workplaces fall off the enforcement radar, green jobs may never even make a blip.

In a speech last week to INTERPOL, the UK Environment Agency chair Lord Smith called for a European alliance to tackle the toxic trade in electrical waste into Africa. He said better cooperation and exchange of intelligence across national borders was necessary to stop a crime that poses a “growing and persistent risk to human health and the environment”.

According Lord Smith, the Environment Agency currently provides criminal intelligence on illegal waste exports to 46 countries but has so far received intelligence from only 10 countries in return. The Environment Agency believes the illegal export of electrical waste – such as TV, laptops and mobile phones – is the single biggest growth area in environmental crime. Despite 50 million tonnes of e-waste being generated annually worldwide, it says only 10 per cent is being recycled.

“Electrical waste contains toxins including mercury, arsenic and lead, and the health of children in the developing world is being put at risk when this waste is illegally exported and then burnt to recover the valuable metals inside,” Lord Smith said. “Not only are children being exploited and their health put at risk when they carry out this work, but the toxins are also contaminating air, land and water.”

Lord Smith indicated the INTERPOL E-Waste Crime Group would only work if there was more effective exchange of information across borders.

The international Electronics TakeBack Coalition (ETBC) estimates over 1,000 materials, including chlorinated solvents, brominated flame retardants, PVC, heavy metals, plastics and gases, are used to make electronic products and their components—semiconductor chips, circuit boards, and disk drives.

It adds that a computer screen can contain between four and eight pounds of lead alone. Big screen TVs contain even more than that. Flat panel TVs and monitors contain less lead, but use mercury lamps. About 40 per cent of the heavy metals, including lead, mercury and cadmium, in landfills come from electronic equipment discards.

GROWING PROBLEM Pesticides might make your garden grow, but they also do the same for childhood and occupational tumours.

A ‘dramatic’ increase in a range of occupational and childhood cancers has been linked to pesticide exposures.

Public health researchers, writing in a new report for the Chemicals, Health and Environment Monitoring Trust (CHEM Trust), call on the UK government to step up action to ban the most harmful pesticides and to bring in a duty for the public to be informed before spraying takes place.

They add that safer alternatives are available and are preferable to attempting to avoid occupational or environmental exposures to inherently dangerous substances.

‘A review of the role pesticides play in some cancers: Children, farmers and pesticide users at risk?’, published on 2 July 2010, links exposure prior to conception or during pregnancy to higher rates of childhood cancer and warns that farm workers could also be developing cancers caused by pesticide exposures at work.

The report says several studies “strongly suggest” that pesticide exposures are associated with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL), leukaemia, prostate cancer and other hormone-related cancers. It adds that environmental factors “must be partly to blame” for massive increases in the incidence of certain cancers since 1975 – because genes in a population do not change that quickly.

Since the mid-1970s, cases of NHL have more than doubled in Britain, prostate cancer has tripled, testicular cancer has doubled and breast cancer in women has increased by two-thirds, and in men has quadrupled, the report notes. In the 35 years up to 1998, childhood cancer in Britain increased by 35 per cent, it adds. Although the increasing numbers may be in part a result of better diagnosis, the report authors believe environmental factors, including pesticides, are a contributory factor.

Stirling University’s Professor Andrew Watterson, a co-author of the report, commented: “Occupational and environmental cancers have been a neglected public health issue in the UK for decades. The report highlights the substantial nature of the threat from pesticide exposure.

“In the UK, oversight of pesticides has continued to err on the side of products rather than people and of course relies on data generated initially by the pesticide manufacturers. The regulatory response has usually been ‘if in doubt, do continue using pesticides’ when the scientific literature is littered with examples of products that have been cleared in the past emerging as known or suspect human carcinogens.

“There is a long-overdue and urgent need to mount a cancer prevention campaign on pesticides based on effective precautionary principles.”

Gwynne Lyons, director of CHEM Trust and co-author of the report, commented: “Research suggests that pregnant women, in particular, should avoid direct exposure to pesticides, if possible.”

She accused the UK of dragging its feet on risks posed by chemicals. “It is high time that the UK was more supportive of EU proposals to take a tougher approach to reducing exposure to potentially harmful chemicals,” she said. “If the UK is to shed its image of being the laggard in the EU, then the UK government must robustly implement the new EU pesticides legislation in order to try and reduce the burden of cancer in children, farmers and others exposed to pesticides.”

Professor Watterson said it was not realistic to expect the public to avoid farms and other areas where pesticides may be used. Instead, he said, the government needed to strengthen regulation to remove the risks in the first place. “There are substitutes available,” he said. “There are less hazardous alternatives.”

WELL WELL BP global CEO Tony Hayward has agreed to President Obama's demand for a compensation fund. This year's $5bn payment will still leave the UK-based oil giant with change of $600 million from its 2010 first quarter profits.

Members of the US Congress tore into the big energy corporations on 15 June for filing almost identical Gulf of Mexico oil spill response plans – which included contact details for a deceased scientist and steps to protect marine mammals not found in the region’s waters.

Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell all have identical response plans to BP, said House energy and commerce committee chair Henry Waxman. The verbal assault by committee members undermined attempts by the oil giants to suggest that their working practices differ from those of BP; and that the catastrophe, which killed 11 workers, would not have happened if the well had been theirs.

Leading the committee’s questioning of energy executives, Democrat Ed Markey focused on their spill response plans. “They cite identical response capabilities and tout identical ineffective equipment. In some cases, they use the exact same words,” he said. He added: “Like BP, three other companies include references to protecting walruses, which have not called the Gulf of Mexico home for three million years.”

Under pressure from US president Barack Obama and ahead of a congressional grilling for BP’s London-based chief executive Tony Hayward this week, BP agreed to the president’s demand for the creation of a $20bn (£13.5bn) compensation fund for victims of the Gulf oil spill. The company also told the president it would not pay shareholders a dividend this year – the first time this has happened since World War II. BP’s shares rose sharply on news of the deal.

The agreement requires BP to pay $5bn into the fund this year, significantly less than its first quarter profits. A week after the rig exploded on 20 April, BP announced profits from January to March 2010 of $5.6 billion (£3.6bn).

The US president has expressed renewed interest in a clean energy plan in the wake of the Gulf disaster.

OILY PROBLEM David Cameron tries to grease UK-US relations in a post-BP sliming phone call to US president Barack Obama. But the prime minister also wants to remove legal 'burdens' on business - like safety and environmental regulations.

It’s a story that owes more to the ostrich than the oil covered pelican.

The 14 June screen grab from the front page of the UK Prime Minister’s website shows David Cameron in a phone call to US President Barack Obama, discussing the Gulf of Mexico oil spill calamity.

Cameron’s spokesperson commented: “The prime minister expressed his sadness at the ongoing human and environmental catastrophe in Louisiana,” adding: “President Obama said to the Prime Minister that his unequivocal view was that BP was a multinational global company and that frustrations about the oil spill had nothing to do with national identity. The Prime Minister stressed the economic importance of BP to the UK, US and other countries. The President made clear that he had no interest in undermining BP’s value.”

The disaster, which observers increasingly accept was a product of inadequate regulation, oversight and enforcement, has hobbled a major UK-based firm, caused incalculable economic and environmental damage, has strained relations between the US and the UK and has led for calls for directors of BP to face criminal charges.

There have already been less celebrated casualties, notably the 11 workers who died when the rig exploded on 20 April. Since then many workers involved in the cleanup operation – possibly hundreds – have fallen sick as a result of heat stroke, chemical exposures and other hazards.

Still, with the phone call over it was back to business as usual for the UK Prime Minister – pandering to the business lobby and announcing a review of health and safety legislation, the next headline on the 10 Downing Street website.

Commenting on the review, which forms part of a wider commitment to deregulation targeting all government departments and regulators, the Prime Minister said: “The rise of the compensation culture over the last ten years is a real concern, as is the way health and safety rules are sometimes applied. We need a sensible new approach that makes clear these laws are intended to protect people, not overwhelm businesses with red tape.”

Only there has not been a rise in compensation culture and businesses are not overwhelmed with red tape. Brendan Barber, general secretary of the UK trade union body TUC, said he was “surprised the government is addressing the ‘compensation culture’ again as successive reports show there is no such thing and claims have been falling over the past ten years.” He added: “This will not be an open and frank review aimed at achieving better regulation. Instead it is an attempt to undermine the already limited protection that workers have by focusing on the needs of business.”

The UK union leader concluded: “Businesses are responsible for a working culture that injures a quarter of a million workers every year and makes a further half a million employees ill. The review should by investigating this instead. Rather than focusing solely on the ‘needs of business’, the government should protect workers by increasing inspections and enforcement action against employers who put their staff at risk by ignoring existing laws, as well as introducing a legal duty on directors to protect their workers.”

Whether you are talking the mine deaths at Massey Energy, the refinery deaths at Texas City or the offshore deaths in the Gulf of Mexico, the common theme is a failure of responsibility and accountability on the part of companies. You can pair that each time with a failure of official regulation and oversight on the part of government.

Hand-wringing from Cameron and other political leaders over the “sadness” unleashed by BP, Transocean, Halliburton and the litany of deadly businesses from Union Carbide to Massey to McWane, is a seriously unsatisfactory alternative to protecting lives, livelihoods and the environment.

To do that governments must behave responsibly, and that means more than just demanding responsibility from business. It means less time spent appeasing regulation averse boardrooms and more time regulating them. What business calls “red tape” is for many workers their lifeline. Removing or not enforcing legal protections makes a government an accessory to the crime.

HSE says it is acting after its first targeted waste programme “arrested the rising accident rate and brought about a small reduction” but adds “the accident rate is still high (typically 4 times the all industry average for all injuries to workers and typically 9 times the all industry average for fatal injuries to workers).”

It says the interventions will “be undertaken to assess the safety management systems of national waste management and recycling companies who undertake waste and recycling collection services,” with the following firms targeted: Biffa Waste Management Limited; European Metal Recycling Limited; Enterprise Limited; May Guerney Recycling (aka ECT Recycling); SERCO Limited; Shanks Waste Management Limited; Sita UK Limited; Veolia Environmental Services Limited; Verdant Group plc; and Viridor Waste Management Limited.

A number of these firms have recent prosecutions for serious safety breaches.

The union GMB has campaigned for manslaughter charges to be brought in the case of member Dennis Krauesslar, 59, who was killed on 10 September 2007 by a mechanical digger when depositing grass cuttings at Biffa’s Newbury recycling centre. Biffa pleaded guilty to related safety charges in February 2010.

Veolia was fined £100,000 and ordered to pay £22,000 costs at Birmingham Crown Court in July 2009 for a health and safety breach that led to a worker being seriously injured in a fall.  In February 2010, the company, which says it is the UK’s leading waste and recycling firm and which parades its environmental and safety credentials, was fined £130,000 after a worker was killed when a 1,100-litre recycling bin fell on his head.

And European Metal Recycling Ltd was fined £2,500 and £2,454 costs in October 2008 after an agency worker suffered serious injuries in a fall from a lorry.

An HSE Sector Information Minute (SIM), spelling out the purpose and methods of the interventions, notes: “If examination of the overall safety management system through the topics inspected provides (in the inspectors judgement) sufficient evidence to indicate a breach of legislation, then the need for any enforcement action should be considered in accordance with the Enforcement Management Model (EMM) and normal operational considerations should apply.”

It adds that inspectors should consider “director leadership” and “worker engagement” in the firms.

MATRIX RECYCLED This UK e-waste recycling giant recirculated mercury through the workplace via a defective ventilation system, resulting in gross exposures to the workforce.

One of the UK’s largest recycling firms and its director have been fined a total of £145,000 for “shocking” safety breaches that exposed workers to mercury fumes.

Twenty employees of Electrical Waste Recycling Group Ltd (EWR), formerly known as Matrix Direct Recycling Ltd, had levels of mercury in their system above UK guidance levels at the site in Huddersfield, and five of them showed extremely high levels following the exposure in the 10 months between October 2007 and August 2008.

Several workers had reported ill health as a result, including a pregnant worker who was concerned her unborn baby was at risk.

The firm recycles electrical equipment including fluorescent light tubes containing mercury and TV sets and monitors containing lead.

Bradford Crown Court heard that ventilation problems at the plant meant employees were being exposed to potentially harmful emissions from both substances. Mercury vapour was released when the lighting tubes were crushed. Because carbon filters were not fitted on the purpose-designed machine, the contaminated air was itself recycled and pumped back into the premises. One of the ducts pumped contaminated air directly into the office area.

The firm is involved in litigation with the American suppliers of the processing equipment over the missing carbon filters which would have stopped any mercury emissions, the court was told.

On 5 February 2010, EWR was fined £140,000 and ordered to pay £35,127 costs after pleading guilty to criminal safety breaches, including three separate breaches of the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002, and one breach of the Control of Lead at Work Regulations 2002. 

Company director Craig Thompson, 38, was also fined £5,000 after pleading guilty to a criminal breach of the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health Regulations 2002. The judge decided not to disqualify Thompson from being a director. The court was told he had financial difficulties, including debts of £80,000.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE), the UK government’s workplace safety enforcement agency, issued the company five Improvement Notices and one Prohibition Notice – putting an immediate stop to work -  in relation to the incident. Although the company’s own daily tests identified high levels of mercury at the premises, the closure of an oven used to dispose of the chemical failed to solve the problem and by August 2008 HSE had issued the prohibition and improvement notices against the company.

Prior to the prohibition notice, HSE staff had tested the urine of 35 employees at the premises and found 20 had higher than recommended levels of mercury.

Barrister Robert Smith QC, for the companies, said since the prohibition notice was served the firm had spent £350,000 installing an effective emission filter system and a further £281,000-a-year was being spent on additional managers and supervisors. He told the court tests on staff conducted in January 2010 showed all were under the recommended levels.

After the hearing HSE inspector Jeanne Morton said: “This is a shocking case involving a large number of employees, many of them young and vulnerable, who were suddenly faced with the worrying possibility of damage to their long-term health. The risks associated with handling toxic substances like mercury have been known for generations, so it is all the more unacceptable that something like this has happened. The company failed to see the risks created by their recycling work and failed to develop effective plans for safe working. They also did nothing to check their workers’ health after exposure.

“Workers have a right to expect a reasonable level of protection in the workplace, and employers have a legal duty to provide it.”

Max Folkett, site inspector for the Environment Agency, added: “We have worked closely with HSE and other organisations during the investigation which led to this prosecution. Electrical Waste Recycling Group Limited requires an environmental permit from us for the recovery and processing of hazardous waste and we routinely inspect the site to check the company is complying with the permit. We suspended the permit following this incident in August 2008, removing the risk of mercury escaping from the site, because of our concerns the operation posed a serious risk of pollution from mercury.”

Toxic metals use, far from declining, appears to be staging a comeback. Lead use has increased dramatically in recent years. And increased production of electronic equipment worldwide is set to see the use of lead soar over the next decade.

The long term downward trend in mercury production stalled in 2006 and 2007. Latest figures, published in the 2009 edition of the authoritative World Mineral Production, show 1.4 million kilograms were produced in each of these years, a figure the report suggests is an underestimate.

The National Labor College (NLC) and the AFL-CIO’s Center for Green Jobs have launched a monthly online Green Labor Journal to outline issues of sustainability, energy use and climate change from a union perspective.

It says the journal will showcase union green initiatives and provide up-to-date information on new developments in green policy, technology and work processes.

A report in the AFL-CIO’s blog says the journal will emphasise that green jobs must pay decent wages and benefits so workers can sustain themselves and their families. All green policy initiatives also must include fair labour standards.

The online journal also will highlight the important role of unions in environmental debates.

Issue 1 includes details of NLC’s Green Workplace Representative Certificate Program. It says: “Based upon the model of the British Trade Union Congress’s (TUC) Union Green Representative program, the NLC curriculum will provide working people with a practical guide for conducting a workplace audit, organizing a ‘greening committee’ in every workplace, and working with management to make the positive changes necessary to achieve sustainability.”

TUC publishes a regular online Green Workplaces News.

Writing in the first issue of the Green Labor Journal, NLC’s Tom Kriger notes: “Research shows that sustainable workplaces are more productive workplaces.  Thus a further goal of this program is to build cooperative labor-management partnerships so workplaces become safer and more productive, enhance the competitiveness of American firms in the global economy, and contribute to the health of the planet. 

“Based in part upon the role of the health and safety committees that the labor movement pioneered in many workplaces, a workplace “greening committee” would provide the appropriate forum for discussing the results of workplace audits and negotiating steps to address issues identified in the audits.”

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE), the UK government’s workplace health and safety watchdog, says it has “identified that a contributing factor may be that some local authorities are unclear what their legal duties are and mistakenly believe that putting a service out to contract relieves them of all health and safety responsibilities.”

HSE says it hopes new online guidance will help local authorities understand the importance of a sensible approach to health and safety when it comes to procuring and managing waste and recycling services, in a bid to help reduce death and injury. According to HSE figures, the recycling industry has nine times more fatalities than the national average and four times as many workers suffer injuries.

HSE chair Judith Hackitt said: “The guidance will help local authorities understand the full extent of their role when managing waste and recycling contractors. HSE wants to see occupational health and safety become an integral but common sense part of the specification, procurement and management of waste and recycling contracts.”

HSE research has also found workers in the waste and recycling sector have higher sickness rates.