The Center for Public Integrity

CHICAGO — By the time Carlos Centeno arrived at the Loyola University Hospital Burn Center, more than 98 minutes had elapsed since his head, torso, arms and legs had been scalded by a 185-degree solution of water and citric acid inside a factory on this city’s southwestern edge.

The laborer, assigned to the plant that afternoon in November 2011 by a temporary staffing agency, was showered with the solution after it erupted from the open hatch of a 500-gallon chemical tank he was cleaning. Factory bosses, federal investigators would later contend, refused to call an ambulance as he awaited help, shirtless and screaming. He arrived at Loyola only after first being driven to a clinic by a co-worker.

At admission Centeno had burns over 80 percent of his body and suffered a pain level of 10 on a scale of 10, medical records show. Clad in a T-shirt, he wore no protective gear other than rubber boots and latex gloves in the factory, which makes household and personal-care products.

Centeno, 50, died three weeks later, on December 8, 2011.

A narrative account of the accident that killed him — and a description of conditions inside the Raani Corp. plant in Bedford Park, Ill. — are included in a U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration memorandum obtained by the Center for Public Integrity. The 11-page OSHA memo, dated May 10, 2012, argues that safety breakdowns in the plant warrant criminal prosecution — a rarity in worker death cases.

The story behind Centeno’s death underscores the burden faced by some of America’s 2.5 million temporary, or contingent, workers — a growing but mostly invisible group of laborers who often toil in the least desirable, most dangerous jobs. Such workers are hurt more frequently than permanent employees and their injuries often go unrecorded, new research shows.

MIRA LOMA, Calif. – Lawyers alleging wage theft from mostly immigrant Latino contract workers at a Southern California warehouse complex took steps today to add Walmart as a defendant in an ongoing federal lawsuit.

The move is expected to draw the nation’s largest retailer into a case in which it had, heretofore, been tangentially involved – and raises questions about the human cost of Walmart’s tightly controlled supply chain, which relies heavily on contractors and subcontractors.

“Walmart employs a network of contractors and subcontractors who have habitually broken the law to keep their labor costs low and profit margins high,” Michael Rubin, a lawyer for the workers, contended in a written statement to the Center for Public Integrity and the Center for Investigative Reporting. “We believe Walmart knows exactly what is happening and is ultimately responsible for stealing millions of dollars from the low-wage warehouse workers who move Walmart merchandise.”

A court document filed today in Los Angeles claims, "Recent discovery has established that Walmart bears ultimate responsibility for the violations of state and federal law committed against plaintiff warehouse workers," who "perform hard physical labor for long hours with little pay under hot, hazardous, and dust-filled conditions, unloading and loading trucks destined for Walmart stores and distribution centers throughout the United States."

The class-action lawsuit, filed in October 2011, accuses the owner of the Mira Loma warehouse complex, Schneider Logistics Transloading and Distribution, and two staffing agencies of cheating contract workers out of pay.

WINDSOR, Ontario — When some women walk onto a factory floor, punch their time card at a food processing facility, or start their shift at the foundry, they are literally dying to go to work, union members and health care advocates say.

A study that showed women working in those industries have a higher risk for breast cancer raised calls for protection of those workers.

And after the study’s principal researchers presented the results of their work to about 40 people here Monday, the reaction was anger, rather than fear.

“We have to say enough is enough,” said Terry Weymouth, a skills co-ordinator with the Canadian Auto Workers. “We are not dying because we need jobs.

“It’s time we stand up and say this is not right,” she said. “We should be mad. One in nine women are diagnosed with breast cancer.”

The six-year study, published Monday in the journal Environmental Health, examined the occupational histories of 1,006 women in Essex and Kent counties who had breast cancer, and another 1,146 who did not.

The researchers, who came from Canada, the U.S., and the U.K., took into account factors like smoking, weight, alcohol use and other lifestyle and reproductive factors. The women in the study worked in auto parts plants, casinos, food canning factories, on farms, and in metalworking plants.

The researchers found that women who work in the automotive plastics industry were almost five times as likely to develop breast cancer, prior to menopause, as women in a control group.

Lead researcher James Brophy called the work “a local study that has far-reaching implications.”

A federal enforcement blitz targeting coal mines with potentially dangerous levels of dust found a host of violations at more than a dozen sites where conditions left miners at risk for developing black lung disease.

Following the April 2010 explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in southern West Virginia, regulators have focused on problem mines under a new special enforcement program. The most recent round of inspections, however, used new criteria to target mines likely to have problems controlling the dust that can lead to black lung.

The inspections followed a Center for Public Integrity-NPR investigation that highlighted the resurgence of black lung disease and exposed widespread misconduct by coal companies and often-lax enforcement by the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.

In September, inspectors found more than 120 violations at 13 coal mines. Many companies failed to ventilate working areas properly and relied on broken-down equipment to suppress dust, citations allege. Two of the mines cited are owned by Robert Murray, who has lent strong support to presidential candidate Mitt Romney. A representative for Murray Energy Corp. could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

The inspections focused heavily on mines in Appalachia, where the increase in black lung has been most dramatic. Overall, rates of the disease have declined since 1969, when, in a landmark law, Congress forced companies to control dust levels.

NARRAGANSETT, R.I. — “Get your panic out now!”

Veteran fisherman Fred Mattera stands atop a fishing trawler at the Point Judith Harbor, seagulls squawking by and a fishy mist in the air, and instructs the seven mostly young, tattooed men standing before him to pull on life-safety immersion suits that cover them from foot to head, to zip up and plunge feet first into the water. Then two groups of fishermen interlock like centipedes and take turns paddling backward until they reach a life raft where, going smallest man first, they pull in one by one.

This is survival training, and the plunge-and-rescue dry run is meant to gird the fishermen for the real thing, which comes too often in an industry beset by a high death rate and fragile federal net of protection.

Commercial fishing is the deadliest vocation in the United States. Four years running, from 2007 to 2010, the Bureau of Labor Statistics ranked commercial fishing as the most dangerous occupation in the United States. From 2000 to 2010, the industry’s death rate was 31 times greater than the national workplace average.

And no place, a recent National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health report reveals, is more deadly for commercial fishermen than the East Coast. From 2000-2009, the NIOSH report shows, 165 fishermen died from Florida to Maine. That’s more than Alaska — 133 deaths — which had long been viewed as the most brutal place for commercial fishing but saw deaths dip amid a safety push. It’s a greater death toll than in the Gulf of Mexico, which suffered 116 deaths, or the West Coast, with 83.

Research supports an Obama administration plan to reduce coal miners’ exposure to the dust that causes black lung, a much-anticipated Government Accountability Office report released Friday found.

Last December, House Republicans inserted language into an appropriations bill requiring the study. No money could be used to implement a proposed coal mine dust rule until the GAO evaluated the research underpinning it, the rider said.

The GAO report lends support to one piece of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration’s efforts to address a resurgence of black lung, particularly in parts of Appalachia. A Center for Public Integrity-NPR investigation in July found that the disease has returned amid widespread cheating on required dust sampling by some mining companies and enforcement lapses by MSHA.

In October 2010, the agency proposed cutting in half the amount of dust to which miners could be exposed, but the proposal has drawn opposition from some in the mining industry and Congress. Some miners’ advocates worry the rule could die, as previous reform attempts have, if it isn’t finalized before the coming election.

“Black lung is a growing health crisis,” Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., said in a statement Friday. “But special interests and their congressional allies have repeatedly tried to stop the mine safety agency from updating its rules to address this disease. The GAO’s report shows that the latest line of attack was groundless and, as a result, unsuccessful. Opponents of the proposed rule attacked the science, but the study they called for shows the science to be sound: the proposed rule would reduce coal miners’ risk of developing black lung.”