NEW SOLUTIONS: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy

The so-called New Economy of the 1990s failed to deliver its promise of clean work and huge leaps in productivity; what really happened was an intensification of economic pressures on marginal workers. The effects on employment include: increasing income disparities, fewer jobs that lead to viable career tracks, less secure employment, longer working hours, and higher risk of uncompensated unemployment. Workers who are either newly entering the workforce or who do not have the training or skills to trade up in employment are under pressure from falling middle- and lower-income wage scales and increasing income disparities. Their opportunities are increasingly limited, whether by seeking better-paying jobs with other employers or moving up the now-shortened ladder at one employer. They face a declining choice of employment opportunities and well-paying jobs that tend to be concentrated in residual dangerous work in manufacturing or service subsectors that are often small or economically marginal. These forces appear to be pushing workers into accepting jobs in the diminishing but still substantial number of jobs that remain that are dirty and dangerous, as illustrated by the extreme example of McWane Pipe. Those who are forced into these dangerous jobs will once again most likely be the poorly prepared, the new-entry, the recent immigrant, and the illiterate worker. National occupational injury statistics may conceal the experience of these marginal industries by aggregating them into much bigger economic sectors. To understand this phenomenon, we need studies that examine the social choices and tradeoffs involving employment from the point of view of the worker and develop a means of monitoring these tradeoffs.

The United States' Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993 was an effort to provide national support for families attempting to balance the demands of the workplace and the need to care for a new child, one's own health, or an ill child, spouse, or parent. It is seriously limited, however, in terms of its accessibility for many workers. We briefly compare the FMLA to the substantially broader policies of Western European countries. We highlight its reported benefits to workers but document disparities in employees' use of the FMLA by gender, race, and income level. We evaluate whether employers' fears of higher costs were justified. We point out current challenges that may limit the FMLA further. We close by examining the range of alternative policies in effect at the state level and proposals that would address the current limitations of the FMLA and broaden its coverage.

In 1990 the U.S. Congress passed a law providing compensation to former uranium miners who became ill while the U.S. Government was the sole purchaser of uranium. Ten years later, in 2000, the law was amended to correct widely perceived problems. We reviewed the content of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) laws and regulations, cataloged complaints about the 1990 law, compared the law to the scientific knowledge base in 1990 and in the present, reviewed the 2000 amendments to RECA, and drew lessons about how such compensation programs might be better structured. We concur with popular sentiment that the 1990 law had numerous flaws, the central one being that it failed to compensate many miners who by most other standards would have been deemed deserving. This problem arose through setting exposure criteria very high (at six to 15 times elevated risk), with a disproportionate burden placed on miners who had smoked. The additional burden on smokers was exacerbated by a very stringent definition of smokers (one pack-year in a lifetime). Federal compensation laws should prioritize payment to deserving claimants rather than excluding undeserving claimants. Thus, a doubling of risk should be an upper limit for setting an eligibility threshold and a lower “significant contributory effect” standard could be considered more appropriate. Uncertainties in exposure and in dose response should be considered and resolved with a bias toward compensation. Beyond setting appropriate criteria, an active effort is needed to inform potentially eligible people and to assist them in qualifying; the eligibility criteria and the requirements for documentation should be appropriate for Native Americans and other cultural groups. Built-in evaluation mechanisms are needed for all compensation programs to assess whether they are meeting their stated objectives.