Recognize Aerosol Transmissible Disease and Require Appropriate Protections;Promote Worker Driven Biomonitoring and Worker Driven Remedy;Restrict Antibiotics in Animal Agriculture;Legalize Marijuana Federally and Require Pot Purveyors to Sign Neutrality Agreements with Labor Unions

Barrier Face Coverings and Aerosol-Transmissible Disease

In this issue of NEW SOLUTIONS, the articles discuss a wide variety of important issues. These include aerosol-transmissible diseases, biomonitoring, worker-driven remedy, agricultural products and drugs. First, Mark Nicas ¹ debates with Lisa Brosseau and Jeffrey Stull ² about the purpose and value of the ASTM 3502 Standard Specification for Barrier Face Coverings. All involved offer their opinions in the best interests of worker health and safety. NEW SOLUTIONS offers this debate in the best spirit of scientific inquiry in support of developing optimal occupational health policies and practices.

On a similar topic, we bring you “Preventing Aerosol-Transmissible Diseases in Healthcare Settings: The Need for Protective Guidelines and Standards – Workshop Report.” ³ The report calls for full recognition of the role of aerosol transmission for many infectious pathogens and for recognition that numerous pathogens are transmissible via inhalation. It calls for application of the precautionary principle to novel pathogens by assuming they are aerosol transmissible until demonstrated otherwise. In addition, it calls for recognition and accounting for the role of asymptomatic / presymptomatic cases in aerosol transmission of diseases. As a consequence of the above, the report calls for explicit, and robust standards for all healthcare facilities to improve indoor air quality through ventilation, filtration, and other measures and for recognition that NIOSH-approved respirators must be used to prevent healthcare personnel exposure to aerosol-transmissible diseases. By now, all of these should be apparent lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic. If these lessons are not applied, we place healthcare workers and the rest of us at considerable, unnecessary and unacceptable risk.

Worker-Driven Chemical Monitoring and Worker-Driven Remedy

This issue features a truly innovative approach to monitoring chemical exposure in the workplace in the absence of meaningful employer participation or state enforcement. “Biomonitoring of exposures to solvents and metals in electronics manufacturing facilities in Batam, Indonesia” by Lee, Jung Hyun et al. ⁴ describes how scientists working with unions and NGOs obtained and tested pre- and post-shift urine samples without participation of employers or state agencies. Although the results were not statistically significant, due to small sample size, the study provides a model of worker-centered research that can be performed without the support of employers or state agencies. The employees who participated in this research were true collaborators and not just research “subjects.” As described in the article “Workers’ active participation and involvement of the union and NGOs played essential roles in study planning, securing the funding, conducting the workshop, recruitment, sample collection and sample handling.”

About fifty electronics workers attended a training workshop that covered topics including right-to-know, hazard mapping, body mapping, health effects of chemical exposures, what biomonitoring is and why it is done. Workshop attendees were invited to participate in the research project on a voluntary basis. At the end of the project, another meeting was held to report back the results. One of the important lessons that the researchers reported is that strong unions are necessary to assure robust worker recruitment, training, and participation in sample collection. They emphasized the importance of additional research to investigate how participatory biomonitoring can contribute to building systems for exposure assessment and occupational health risk reduction. Such research could build on a lay consensus statement ⁵ published in NEW SOLUTIONS in 2008.

Expanding this model to the greatest extent possible will play an important role in protecting the health and safety of electronics workers. To do so is crucial because there are more than 17 million electronics workers worldwide. ⁵ The number is growing and, as shown by Jung and her colleagues, there is little information about their precise exposure and their associated risks, but the potential risk is quite high.

A somewhat related piece is the document by Electronics Watch on “Principles for Worker-Driven Remedy.” ⁶ The problems that Electronics Watch seeks to remedy include occupational and environmental health, but they are broader. They also include forced labor, excessive overtime, union busting, and wage theft. According to Electronics Watch, remedy is about making whole those workers who have suffered these and other harms. Worker-driven remedy places workers themselves at the center of determining what will make them whole, much as the Batam research project, described above, centered workers. Electronics Watch seeks to use the purchasing power of public entities to enforce worker-driven remedy by directing that purchasing power towards products that don’t have the above abuses in their supply chains or provide worker-driven remedies to such abuses when they are identified. NEW SOLUTIONS strongly supports this approach.

Agricultural Products and Drugs

Two articles in this issue offer qualitative analyses of safety and health issues for workers in the production and delivery of agricultural products. Gigot and colleagues ⁷ interviewed industrial hog operation (IHO) workers. Their study participants reported interacting with sick animals and potentially bringing home dirt, dust, and zoonotic pathogens that might pose health risks to themselves and their family members. The authors cite previously published work that found livestock-associated multidrug-resistant S. aureus among swine, in IHO worker breathing zone air samples, and in ambient air at IHOs. Moreover, they cite work showing that frequent and direct contact with live swine has been associated with colonization of workers by antimicrobial-resistant S. aureus. The authors report that, in 2018, California banned antimicrobial use for animal disease treatment without a veterinarian's prescription and prohibited antimicrobial use for animal disease prevention with or without a prescription. According to the authors, this legislation has been associated with a reduction in antimicrobial resistance of human urine sample E. coli strains. The rest of the country would do well to follow California's lead regarding the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture.

The other agricultural product whose production and use is examined in this issue is cannabis. ⁸ Through qualitative research, Beckman and colleagues ⁸ identified occupational psychosocial hazards for cannabis workers such as long hours, repetitive tasks, geographic and social isolation, emotional labor, high demand and low control, workplace bullying and workplace violence. They identified some policy anomalies in this industry that make these problems difficult to address. The fact that cannabis is illegal on the federal level makes it an all-cash business, even though it is legal on the state level, because banks won’t handle cannabis business. This contributes to the violence and stress. The fact that many of the businesses are in remote rural areas reduces their incentive to comply with the state licensing laws. As a result, they remain illegal. It is very difficult to enforce labor law and health and safety law on the unlicensed part of the business. Federal legalization would be an important step toward improving the health and safety of cannabis workers. The Federal Government would do well to incorporate the provisions of California state law that require employers seeking cannabis licenses to sign agreements with labor unions promising not to resist organizing.