November, 15 2018, 11:00pm EDT
![National Nurses United](https://assets.rbl.ms/32012679/origin.png)
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Kari Jones, 510-433-2759 or Amirah Sequeira, 240-447-0034
Nurses Applaud Introduction of Federal Legislation to Prevent Workplace Violence in Health Care, Social Service Settings
National Nurses United (NNU), the nation's largest union of registered nurses, announced its support for the Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act, HR 7141, introduced today by Representative Joe Courtney (CT-2).
WASHINGTON
National Nurses United (NNU), the nation's largest union of registered nurses, announced its support for the Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act, HR 7141, introduced today by Representative Joe Courtney (CT-2).
The bill, introduced with the support of 20 other members of Congress would mandate that the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) create a national standard requiring health care and social service employers to develop and implement a comprehensive workplace violence prevention plan. This legislation is especially important, given that healthcare and social service workers face extremely high rates of workplace violence.
"We applaud Rep. Courtney for introducing a bill that is so critical, not just for nurses and other health care workers, but also for patients, families, and visitors, given that violence impacts everyone in the vicinity of healthcare and social service settings," said NNU Executive Director Bonnie Castillo.
"Studies have shown that the frequency and severity of violent attacks can be drastically reduced through comprehensive workplace violence prevention plans. Congressman Ro Khanna led the way this past spring, when he introduced the first workplace violence prevention bill for health care facilities, which has bipartisan support. We applaud Rep. Courtney for building on that legislation and including social service settings in this bill. The introduction of this legislation is an important step forward in the fight to ensure that employers are required to protect their workers from violence before it happens."
"We expect health care and social service employees to care for us in our times of need, but we know that each year, these men and women are faced with rising rates of violence, often from patients and their families," said Congressman Courtney. "This legislation compels OSHA to do what employees, safety experts, and Members of Congress have been calling for years - create an enforceable standard to ensure that employers are taking these risks seriously, and creating safe workplaces that their employees deserve."
The legislation introduced by Rep. Courtney follows the adoption by California OSHA of a groundbreaking health care workplace violence standard that was the result of state legislation sponsored by the California Nurses Association/National Nurses United.
Workplace Violence Prevention for Health Care and Social Service Workers Act Overview
- Addresses an epidemic of violence: Workers in the health care and social assistance industry face extremely high rates of workplace violence. Between 2011 and 2016, as reported in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, at least 58 hospital workers died as a result of violence in their workplaces. In 2016, the Government Accountability Office found that health care workers at inpatient facilities were 5 to 12 times more likely to experience nonfatal workplace violence than workers overall.
- Requires federal OSHA to create a federal workplace violence prevention standard mandating employers develop comprehensive, workplace-specific plans to prevent violence before it happens.
- Covers a wide variety of workplaces, including hospitals, residential treatment facilities, non-residential treatment settings, medical treatment or social service settings in correctional or detention facilities, psychiatric treatment facilities, substance use disorder treatment centers, community care settings such as group homes and mental health clinics, and federal health care facilities such as those operated by the Veterans Administration and the Indian Health Service, as well as field work settings such as home care and home-based hospice, and emergency services and transport services.
- Sets a quick timeline on implementation to ensure timely protection for healthcare workers.
- Sets minimum requirements for the standard and for employers' workplace violence prevention plans, based on the groundbreaking California legislation. These requirements include unit-specific assessments and implementation of prevention measures, including physical changes to the environment, staffing for patient care and security, employee involvement in all steps of the plan, hands on training, robust record keeping requirements including a violent incident log, protections for employees to report WPV to their employer and law enforcement, among other requirements.
"Workplace violence against health care and social service workers continues to affect those who dedicate their lives to caring for others," said Bobby Scott (VA-03), Ranking Member of the Committee on Education and the Workforce. "This bill helps address this growing problem by requiring the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to set an enforceable standard that will protect workers from preventable acts of workplace violence. I am grateful to Rep. Courtney for his leadership on this bill and will work to give this legislation the urgent attention that it deserves."
"Right now, health care and social service employers are not doing enough to prevent the violent incidents that nurses and other workers experience daily. Under the proposed federal standard, employers would need to assess and implement interventions that can reduce violence--for example, affixing furniture and lighting so they can't be used as weapons," said Jean Ross, RN, NNU co-president. "It's so important for nurses, doctors, and other health care and social service workers to be directly involved in the development and implementation of these plans, because employees know best the risks we face on the job. We applaud Rep. Courtney and the other co-sponsors for listening to the concerns of workers and moving forward with legislation that will prevent injuries and save lives."
National Nurses United, with close to 185,000 members in every state, is the largest union and professional association of registered nurses in US history.
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Climate and environmental defenders on this week implored U.S. senators to block a permitting reform bill introduced this week by Sens. Joe Manchin and John Barrasso that one campaigner linked to Project 2025, a conservative coalition's agenda for a far-right overhaul of the federal government.
Common Dreamsreported Monday that Manchin (I-W.Va.) and Barrasso (R-Wyo.)—respectively the chair and ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee—introduced the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024.
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) noted that although the proposal "includes several positive reforms for the accelerated development of transmission projects," it also advocates "limiting opportunities for communities to challenge projects, loosening oversight for drilling and mining projects, extending drilling permits and fast-tracking [liquified natural gas] permits, and several other provisions friendly to fossil fuel giants."
"This dangerous bill doesn't deserve a floor vote."
These are nearly identical policies to what's proposed in Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership. The plan, which was spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, calls for "unleashing all of America's energy resources," including by ending federal restrictions on fossil fuel drilling on public lands; limiting investments in renewable energy; and rolling back environmental permitting restrictions for new oil, gas, and coal projects, including power plants.
While Manchin has been trying—and failing—to pass fossil fuel-friendly permitting reform legislation for years, Brett Hartl, director of public affairs at the Center for Biological Diversity, said that his "Frankenstein legislation is taken straight from Project 2025, and it's the biggest giveaway in decades to the fossil fuel industry."
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Hartl added that "to preserve a livable planet," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) "must squash this legislation now."
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NRDC managing director of government affairs Alexandra Adams said Wednesday that "this bill is a giveaway for the oil and gas industry that will ramp up drilling and environmental destruction at a time when we need to be putting a hard stop to fossil fuels."
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Sudan's military is blocking United Nations aid trucks from entering at a key border crossing, causing severe disruptions in aid in a country that experts fear may be on the brink of one of the worst famines the world has seen in decades, The New York Timesreported Friday.
The border city of Adré in eastern Chad is the main international crossing into the Darfur region of Sudan, but the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), the state's official military, which is engaged in a civil war with a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), has refused to issue permits for U.N. trucks to enter there, as it's an RSF-controlled area.
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Last week, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the United States ambassador to the U.N., said that the SAF's obstruction of the border was "completely unacceptable."
Both warring parties in Sudan continue to perpetrate brazen atrocities, including starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. This piece focuses on the SAF's ongoing obstruction of essential aid. The situation is catastrophic. The policy is criminal. https://t.co/FKhqQh3EI9.
— Tom Dannenbaum (@tomdannenbaum) July 26, 2024
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Another mother, Dahabaya Ibet, said that her 20-month-old boy had to bear witness to his grandfather being shot and killed in front of his eyes when the family home in Darfur was attacked by gunmen late last year.
Now the mothers and their families are refugees in Adré, where 200,000 Sudanese are living in an overcrowded, under-resourced transit camp.
In addition to those that have made it out of the country, there are 11 million people internally displaced within Sudan, most of whom have become displaced since the civil war began in April 2023.
An unnamed senior American official told the Times that the looming famine in Sudan could be as bad as the 2011 famine in Somalia or even the great Ethiopian famine of the 1980s.
In April, Reutersreported that people in Sudan were eating soil and leaves to survive, and The Washington Postcalled it a nation in "chaos," reporting that World Food Program trucks had been "blocked, hijacked, attacked, looted, and detained."
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The U.S. last week announced $203 million in additional aid to Sudan—part of a $2.1 billion pledge that world leaders made in April, which some countries have not yet delivered on.
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The International Service for Human Rights on Friday warned that both the SAF and RSF were engaged in wrongful killings and arrests, especially targeted at lawyers, doctors, and activists. The group called for an immediate cease-fire.
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After days of condemnation from critics including actress Jennifer Aniston and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, U.S. Sen. JD Vance was given the opportunity on Thursday to clarify his remarks from 2021 in which he said the Democratic Party was run by "childless cat ladies."
Instead, the Ohio Republican and running mate of former President Donald Trump assured SiriusXM host Megyn Kelly on "The Megyn Kelly Show" that while he has "nothing against cats," he meant what he said in terms of "the substance" of his argument.
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The comments in question were made by Vance to then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson when Vance was running for the Senate.
Calling out Buttigieg—who, the secretary disclosed this week, was struggling at the time to adopt a child with his husband—and Vice President Kamala Harris, a stepmother of two and the Democratic Party's presumptive presidential nominee, Vance said people without biological children "don't really have a direct stake in" the future of the country and therefore shouldn't hold higher office.
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He also specifically categorized people who don't have children as "bad" in an interview in 2021, saying the government should "reward the things that we think are good" and "punish the things that we think are bad," with people taxed at a lower rate if they have children.
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In his interview with Kelly on Thursday, Vance attempted to pivot away from his own comments, saying his point was to criticize "the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child" and claiming without evidence that the Harris campaign had "come out against the child tax credit"—a signature policy of the Biden-Harris administration.
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Vance and Kelly went on to lament the anxiety "hardcore environmentalists" and progressive lawmakers such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have expressed about the damage fossil fuel extraction is doing the planet, accusing them of pushing people to forgo having families—but said nothing about Republican policies that have made child-rearing less accessible.
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Under Republican abortion bans, numerous stories have cropped up of pregnant people who have been forced to carry pregnancies to term despite finding out that their fetuses had fatal abnormalities and would die soon after birth—as have stories of children who were forced to give birth or had to cross state lines in order to get abortion care.
As with his position that nonparents should be "punished" for not having children, "who else does 'pro-child/family' Vance think should 'face consequences and reality' by way of curtailing choices, rights, and freedoms?" asked writer Alheli Picazo. "Women and girls who become pregnant through rape/incest."
University of North Carolina law professor Carissa Byrne Hessick said that one could test "empirically" Vance's claim that Democratic policies are anti-family.
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