Archive for August, 2015

The AI Robotic Tsunami: Coming To A Workplace Near You!

Wednesday, August 26th, 2015

In 2013, Oxford professors Carl Frey and Michael Osborne published what became a highly read and highly cited study suggesting that machines could replace 47% of America’s jobs over the next 25 years. To say that they got the business world’s attention is a little bit like saying Ted Williams was a pretty good ballplayer.

The study, which examined more than 700 US occupations, found that jobs in transportation, logistics, and administrative and office work are at “high risk” for automation. “We identified several key bottlenecks currently preventing occupations being automated,” said Dr. Osborne when the study was released. “As big data helps to overcome these obstacles, a great number of jobs will be put at risk.”

Consider transportation. As of July 17, 2015, more than 20 Google self-driving cars have logged more than 1.9 million miles around California streets and have yet to cause an accident, although they’ve been hit 14 times by other cars, 11 of those hits being rearenders. So, how long do you think it will be before the transportation industry latches onto the self-driving phenomenon as a way to cut costs and increase productivity?

And logistics? Even now, Amazon and other retailers are flying drones around their warehouses delivering material for shipment, work that, before Dronedom, actual human beings performed, albeit more slowly and, every once in a while, with a bit of breakage.

And can we ignore IBM’s Watson, or Rethink Robotic’s Baxter (The AI parents just have to give their artificially intelligent children human names, don’t they?)?

The productivity increase is awesome, indeed. But the trade-off is a human job.

Of course, someone has to keep the drones flying. And someone has to keep Google’s cars humming along. This is a point the good Drs. Frey and Osborne did not examine deeply in their 2013 paper- that as jobs are eliminated due to automation, other jobs, more complex in most cases, will be created. This from the paper:

Our findings imply that as technology races ahead, low-skilled workers will move to tasks that are not susceptible to computerization – i.e., tasks that require creative and social intelligence. For workers to win the race, however, they will have to acquire creative and social skills.

But, hang on a minute. Just when we begin to think that Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” is a’comin round the corner like an out-of-control, self-driving 18-wheeler, Forrester Research released yesterday The Future of Jobs, 2025: Working Side-By-Side With Robots (the study may be purchased from Forrester for $499.00). Authored by Forrester analyst J. P. Gownder, the paper only looks out ten years, compared to Frey and Osborne’s 25. Even so, Gownder’s prognosis is nowhere as bleak as the Oxfordians’. They postulate a total job loss of 71 million. Gownder, using government data and many interviews with business execs, academics and pundits, suggests a net job loss of 9.1 million, or 7% of the workforce.  Where I come from, J. P., that’s a lot of jobs, but I take your point.

Notwithstanding the competing research, what we can say is that big change is not coming; it’s already here. This is an industrial era evolution. There have been many before. Remember that before the automobile, there was a thriving market for buggy whips.

This is one of the topics I’ll be covering on Thursday, October 29, in my Keynote Address to the Idaho Industrial Commission’s 2015 Annual Seminar on Workers’ Compensation. I’ll be discussing how artificial intelligence, along with two other emerging employment issues, is impacting workers’ compensation and how smart employers can deal with it successfully.

Meanwhile, here’s a little something for workers who awaken one day to find their newest work partner is no longer Homo Sapiens, but rather Ratus Robotus.

Workers who adjust survive.
Many of them even thrive.

Health Wonk Review’s August edition, hot off the presses

Thursday, August 20th, 2015

Neither blazing sun nor heatwaves nor droughts can stop our intrepid health wonks from opining and blogging. At Health System Ed blog, Peggy Salvatore hosts a great summer roundup of best-of posts: Health Wonk Review: The More Things Change, The More They Cost.

Here’s a bit of a preview: Eye Selfies. Big Tobacco Abroad. Big Pharma. Something conspicuously absent from the first Republican debate. One of our wonkers on NPR. Personalized Medicine. There’s more, too – check it out.

Also, you can follow more timely reports from our wonkers via this Health Wonk Review Twitter list. Twitter is super active in the areas of healthcare, workers comp, safety, insurance – even if you don’t think you want to Tweet yourself, signing up just to lurk and follow others can be very informative and often entertaining. Follow us on Twitter.

Fall from Grace: Dupont in OSHA’s Severe Violator Enforcement Program

Friday, August 14th, 2015

For many who have had careers committed to safe workplaces, it’s a bit of a heartbreak to see that Dupont, once a pinnacle of safety, is now placed in OSHA’s “Severe Violator Enforcement Program.” This action is the result of investigations spawned by the deadly chemical leak at the La Porte, TX facility last November. The leak claimed the lives of four workers and hospitalized another. Sandy Smith reports in her EHS Today article, OSHA Revisits DuPont Facility Where Four Workers Died, Issues More Citations:

In his remarks about the enforcement action against the company, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health David Michaels took aim at the company’s reputation for safety. “DuPont promotes itself as having a ‘world-class safety’ culture and even markets its safety expertise to other employers, but these four preventable workplace deaths and the very serious hazards we uncovered at this facility are evidence of a failed safety program,” said Michaels.

Neena Satija and Jim Malewitz report in the Texas Tribune: New OSHA Penalties for DuPont After Deadly Leak

“We have concerns about the safety culture,” David Michaels, the agency’s director, said in an interview Thursday. “We expect chemical facilities where highly toxic materials are used to have a culture that focuses on ensuring worker protection. It appears to have broken down.”

In a May interview with The Texas Tribune, Michaels called the initial $99,000 fine “petty cash” for the multibillion-dollar company and said he wished he could dole out harsher penalties.

On Thursday, he said fines matter little for any company that large, but shining a spotlight on a company that has long touted a goal of “zero safety incidents” will send a message to employers nationwide.”

A must-read account: Up In the Tower

In reading accounts of the November chemical disaster, it’s apparent that this came very close to being much worse – not just for plant workers, but also the larger community.

We call your attention to Up in the Tower, an excellent and eye-opening article in Texas Monthly by Lise Olsen that dissects the events leading up to and during the tragic November day. It lays bare many of the failures, warning signs and build up to the day’s events. By painting portraits of the deceased workers and their actions, it also puts a human face on the tragedy.

Olsen outlines how Dupont’s fall from grace began a number of years ago, a result of many factors: pressure to increase profits for shareholders, corporate restructurings, high turnover with more experienced workers retiring or leaving and being replaced by less experienced workers. Dupont experienced prior safety failures leading to fatalities:

DuPont experts continue to deliver lectures at global safety conferences and make millions peddling their safety programs to other companies, with results that they say have been proved. But the corporation’s pristine safety reputation suffered after toxic releases killed two workers at chemical complexes in New York and West Virginia. One longtime DuPont employee was fatally poisoned in 2010 after cheap plastic tubing burst inside a shed at DuPont’s plant in Belle, West Virginia, dousing him with phosgene, a gas that had been used as a chemical weapon in World War I. That same year, an explosion killed a contract welder and injured his co-worker in Buffalo, New York. They hadn’t been warned of a possible gas buildup inside the tank they were repairing. The U.S. Chemical Safety Board, a small federal agency that investigates the nation’s worst industrial chemical accidents, reviewed both cases and criticized DuPont. Company officials had failed to follow their own maintenance and safety rules, the board said. “In light of this, I would hope that DuPont officials are examining the safety culture company-wide,” the board’s former chairman John Bresland announced in July 2011.

OSHA is trying to compensate for the low fines by shining a spotlight on the company’s practices so an article like Olsen’s may have wider exposure than the typical OSHA releases, which tend to mainly garner coverage in trade publications. Certainly, the fines are little comfort to the surviving families, as Olsen notes:

The penalties and company assurances seem small to Gilbert and his family. He and his wife canceled the big fiftieth-wedding-anniversary party they’d planned with all four of their children. Their sons’ smiling faces appear in the family portraits that line their shelves and walls, but family gatherings are more somber now. Gibby’s widow comes alone; Robert’s wife is raising their young children without him. Gilbert has accepted that Robert died trying to rescue his co-worker. He takes some comfort knowing that Gibby helped save another man’s life and perished trying to save his brother. His sons died heroically, but, he says, their deaths could have been easily prevented if their employer, a multibillion-dollar corporation, had invested in upgrades and followed its own rules. “It wasn’t necessary for them to die.”

 

— Reader comment from our mailbox —

Good Morning.

I was the carrier claims service representative for E. I. DuPont de Nemours from the late 80’s through most of the 90’s at both the Belle, WV plant, as well as, Waynesboro and Martinsville, VA. In the conduct of my responsibilities there, I became somewhat familiar and was impressed by the safety culture at these plants. It’s sad to see this strong emphasis on “Safety First” deteriorate to this point.

I would hope that the pursuit of profit wasn’t a cause of this change in attitude, or the weakening of union influence on safety matters by collusion or desperation for jobs, but it’s hard to think of another explanation.

Regards,
R.S.L, AIC

News Roundup: ADA at 25; Consolidation; Retaliation; “Old Farts” and other noteworthy items

Monday, August 3rd, 2015

Last week, the ADA turned 25. A few noteworthy related posts:

Joe Paduda’s been working through the summer, keeping track of the recent spate of industry consolidations and the implications for workers comp. At his blog, he also features an interesting post about Maryland’s innovative approach to hospital care – and implications for work comp: “…a fundamental shift in medical care is occurring, one that will have a dramatic impact on how patients are evaluated and monitored and incentivized to pursue health, what care is delivered via what method (telemedicine, care extenders, wearable technology). This will dramatically affect workers’ comp – patients will be healthier but the bifurcated payment system will cause headaches.”

Jon Hyman of Ohio Employer’s Law Blog says that while employers tend to associate retaliation with the big employment statutes (Title VII, the ADEA, the ADA, the FMLA, and the FLSA), are dozens of other federal statutes that protect employees from retaliation. He offers a handy alphabetized list: Retaliation alphabet-soup

In what appears destined to be a classic in the “what not to do” department, Robin Shea posts about the court case that followed when an “Old fart” got fired at Employment & Labor Insider. It’s one case with many lessons!

If your summertime vacations include any water sports, you might want to take a look at the Consumer Insurance Blog’s post and video about how drowning doesn’t look like what we see in the movies. The post notes that “We have wrong ideas about drowning and our ignorance means we don’t always recognize the signs of a person in distress when we see them.” This ignorance means that every year, children die in pools and water just feet away from parents or friends who do not recognize the signs of distress.

Lone workers continue to pose a risk challenge for workers comp. At WCI360, there’s a reprint of Tom Musick’s article from The National Safety Council August 2015 newsletter: Taking Steps to Ensure the Safety of People Who Work Alone.

Dave DePaolo says that he reported on Illinois’ lax attitude towards workers’ compensation fraud in 2013 and things have not gotten much better since. In Illinois Light on Fraud, he notes, “The latest report from the WCFU reflects there were just six convictions in 2014, with only one resulting in jail time.”

Advanced Safety and Health reports that OSHA has added key hazards for investigators’ focus in healthcare inspections: “Targeting some of the most common causes of workplace injury and illness in the healthcare industry, OSHA announced the agency is expanding its use of enforcement resources in hospitals and nursing homes to focus on musculoskeletal disorders related to patient or resident handling, bloodborne pathogens, workplace violence, tuberculosis, and slips/trips/falls.”
Related: OSHA Healthcare Inspections

Ken Ward at Coal Tattoo reports on the latest case developments in the criminal trial against Don Blankenship: Why doesn’t Don Blankenship want the jury to hear about the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster?
Follow past case updates here

At The Pump Handle, Celeste Monforton offers a roundup of tributes on the passing of Donald Rasmussen: Coal miners’ physician, humble man. A dedicated worker health and safety advocate, “For more than 50 years, he diagnosed and treated coal miners with work-related lung disease, first at the then Miners Memorial Hospital in Beckley, WV and later at his own black lung clinic.”

Your chance to speak out – deadline August 7
Bob Wilson: The Feds Are Looking to Act on Disability and RTW: Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace
Jennifer Christian: Tell us: Who should be helping workers with health problems keep their jobs? and #1 of 3 fleeting opportunities to influence policy recommendations

More noteworthy news