Worker Solidarity Action Network

3 days ago

Trump’s firings strike the nation’s health agencies
Many of those terminated worked on issues critical to consumers, from improving health care to regulating food packaging to responding to infectious-disease outbreaks.
www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/02/18/trump-health-firings-fda-cdc/
February 18, 2025 at 5:12 p.m. EST5 minutes ago

Demonstrators protest the mass firing of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) employees in front of the CDC headquarters in Atlanta on Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2025. (Arvin Temkar/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/AP)
By Rachel Roubein, Lena H. Sun and Carolyn Y. Johnson
The nation’s health agencies were upended over the weekend by a confusing, slow-motion rollout of terminations that left staff worried about the future of various projects, including those to improve maternal health, discover new cancer treatments and provide help for 9/11 responders.
Several thousand probationary employees across the Department of Health and Human Services were notified they would be terminated after four weeks of leave — fired in what some are calling a “Valentine’s Day massacre.” The termination notices, which arrived over the weekend, capped a chaotic week of speculation about when the cuts would come and who would be affected.
The terminations had a swift impact. The Food and Drug Administration’s top food official resigned Monday, citing the “indiscriminate firing” of 89 staff members from the agency’s food program and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s rhetoric toward staff.

“I was looking forward to working to pursue the Department’s agenda of improving the health of Americans by reducing diet-related chronic disease and risks from chemicals in food,” Jim Jones, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for human foods, wrote in a letter — reviewed by The Washington Post — to the agency’s acting commissioner. “It has been increasingly clear that with the Trump Administration’s disdain for the very people necessary to implement your agenda, however, it would have been fruitless for me to continue in this role.”

Overall, several thousand people from the more than 80,000 workers employed at HHS agencies were told they were terminated. All were probationary, meaning they had just a year or two on the job or had recently been promoted. Many worked on issues critical to consumers, such as improving health care, regulating food packaging or responding to infectious-disease outbreaks.
In interviews, they described a bewildering process that often required them to inform their own bosses they had been terminated.

Demonstrators protest the mass firing of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) employees in front of the CDC headquarters in Atlanta on Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2025. (Arvin Temkar/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/ AP)
The termination messages cite poor job performance, according to more than half a dozen letters from various agencies obtained by The Post. The people who were fired disputed that characterization.

“Unfortunately, the agency finds that you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and skills do not fit the agency’s current needs, and your performance has not been adequate to justify further employment in the agency,” the termination notices state.
The cuts swept across health agencies such as an emergency preparedness office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the FDA. Patient advocacy groups — as well as current and former employees — expressed deep alarm over the cuts.
“The cumulative effects of threatened cuts to federal health research funding and forced departures at our nation’s premier health agencies will put our global leadership and our nation’s health at risk,” a coalition of patient groups, including the Friends of Cancer Research and the American Diabetes Association, wrote in a joint statement.

This article is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials and other people familiar with the terminations, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
The firings at the nation’s health agencies are part of the Trump administration’s swift overhaul of the federal workforce. Thousands of trial and probationary workers across the government have been fired, and courts have been asked to halt the actions.

Protesters hold signs near a demonstration in support of federal workers outside of the Department of Health and Human Services on Friday. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Administration officials have cast the effort as an attempt to make the government more efficient and productive.
Kennedy, who was sworn in last week as HHS secretary, has previously stated a desire to clean house at some of the agencies he now oversees — and his allies say massive change is needed to reverse course in America’s explosion of chronic disease.

“Our plans are radical transparency and returning gold standard science [to] NIH, the FDA and CDC, and ending the corporate capture of those agencies,” Kennedy said after being sworn in as HHS secretary.
In a statement, HHS defended the cuts.
“HHS is following the Administration’s guidance and taking action to support the President’s broader efforts to restructure and streamline the federal government,” the department said. “This is to ensure that HHS better serves the American people at the highest and most efficient standard.”
The initial list of terminations at agencies such as the CDC, FDA and NIH was reduced, according to multiple federal health officials. Many employees were notified that they were placed on administrative leave until March 14, when their terminations would take effect.

At the FDA, hundreds of staffers received termination notices, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. That includes those who work on medical devices, tobacco and food.
Those terminated in the food program were working on nutrition, infant formula and food safety response, as well as 10 staff members who were charged with reviewing potentially unsafe chemicals in the nation’s food supply, Jones wrote in his resignation letter.
The FDA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. An HHS spokesperson thanked Jones for his service, adding that the department welcomes resignations for those “who do not fully align” with the “Make America Healthy Again” initiative.
In late spring, Arielle Kane joined the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Innovation Center to help launch a program aimed at reducing maternal mortality and severe complications in 15 states’ Medicaid programs. She received a firing notice Saturday and said she is worried about the future of the project.

At the Atlanta-based CDC, senior leaders were informed Friday that 1,269 people — nearly 10 percent of the agency staff — would receive termination notices. But Friday evening, the CDC was sent a smaller list, with 750 names. It’s not clear whether additional names will be sent, three federal health officials said.
On Tuesday, dozens of protesters gathered in front of the agency’s main campus to protest the firings.
Among those who received notices were about 20 fellows in an elite laboratory science program, about half of whom were deployed across the country, according to a public health official who had direct knowledge of the terminations. The scientists were part of several outbreak investigations, the official said, including those involving skunk rabies, dengue fever and Oropouche, a viral disease spread by small flies and mosquitoes that causes sudden fever and headache, and that turned deadly for the first time last year in Brazil.

About 130 fellows in another elite public health program that assigns them to state and local health agencies also received termination notices. In the past two years, they have responded to fires and flooding in New Mexico, an environmental disaster in San Diego and an ongoing tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas City, said one fellow in his 30s who received a notice. He spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
“We are the ones that support most of these outbreaks,” he said. “With these cuts you’re hitting the people actually doing the field work.”
Several employees who had worked at the CDC for years also received termination notices. The staffers had received promotions, bumping them from one hiring authority to the next, which reset their probationary periods, according to two federal health officials.

Anthony Gardner, 48, said he was among those who received a termination notice. Gardner had been a contractor but was hired as a federal employee nearly two years ago.
Gardner’s brother died on the 83rd floor of the North Tower at the World Trade Center during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Years later, Gardner became a public affairs specialist for a CDC program that oversees medical monitoring and treatment of first responders and survivors of the attack.
On Saturday, he received a termination notice — along with, he said, 15 of the 90 program employees. Like others who received the notices, Gardner said the reason cited was poor performance, which he argued is not true.
He said he got the top rating — “outstanding” — on each of his last two performance evaluations plus other awards for high performance and excellence.
At NIH, between 1,000 and 1,200 people received letters as of Sunday afternoon, according to two people familiar with the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
For some, notices arrived around dinnertime Saturday. Among those recipients was a scientist with specialized skills who was recruited to NIH to build a laboratory focused on speeding up cancer drug discovery.
One project, which aimed to find a way to block a protein that helps cancer cells survive, was set at the end of February to start screening a vast library of molecules to see which ones might be developed into drugs. That work is now effectively paused.
The purge of probationary employees was the latest disruption to shake the world’s premier biomedical research agency, which has been mired in uncertainty and which saw some senior leaders abruptly retire last week.
After the weekend’s firings, Kennedy held an official welcome ceremony at HHS headquarters Tuesday morning. He pledged to usher in “radical transparency” and suggested global trust in the health agencies he now oversees had declined. … See MoreSee Less

Trump’s firings strike the nation’s health agencies

www.washingtonpost.com

Many of those terminated worked on issues critical to consumers, from improving health care to regulating food packaging to responding to infectious-disease outbreaks.

Worker Solidarity Action Network

3 days ago

On Pacifica's Capitalism, Race & Democracy: USAID and US Foreign Policy in Latin America; DOGE Shuts Down AFL-CIO Solidarity Center; Mutual Aid Campaign for Veteran Black Panthers in California; Tesla Worker Quits, Speaks Out
capitalismraceanddemocracy.org/2025/02/17/usaid-and-us-foreign-policy-in-latin-america-doge-shuts…

By Capitalism, Race & Democracy
–
February 17, 2025

Block Report Radio’s JR Valrey recently sat down with Obi Egbuna Jr., the External Relations officer of the Zimbabwe-Cuba Friendship Association to discuss the US government’s 63-year blockade on Cuba. They also talked about the deportation of US migrants to Guantanamo Bay and El Salvador, the history of US foreign policy towards Colombia, and Trump’s recent attack on USAID.
***
The National Endowment for Democracy, the largest funder of the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center, has been shut down under Trump and Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Led by AFL-CIO president Liz Schuler, the center received 96% of its funding from USAID and the State Department, operating in 62 countries with a $73 million budget and over 400 employees—as many or more than the AFL-CIO itself.
Despite its major role in the AFL-CIO, Schuler and other leaders have remained silent on the shutdown, failing to inform affiliates or address the future of their international operations and impacted workers.
For decades, labor activists have demanded transparency on AFL-CIO’s international activities, including its historic collaboration with the CIA in overthrowing Chile’s Allende government and supporting U.S.-backed coups across Latin America.
Pacifica’s Steve Zeltzer spoke with Purdue University Professor Kim Scipes and retired UAW Local 909 President Frank Hammer about the significance of this closure and the urgent need to hold AFL-CIO leaders accountable.
***
Next, JR Valrey of Block Report Radio sat down with Jordan McGowin of Community Movement Builders to discuss the Mutual Aid for Veteran Black Panther Party Members campaign that is currently underway in California, where every month different veterans in need are given supplemental income, since being a revolutionary community organizer does not come with a pension in the USA.
***
Branton Philipps, an assembly line worker at Tesla’s Fremont, California factory, quit the company last month after years working there. He talked about the real conditions working at Musk’s factory, which employs 20,000 workers, and why he’d had enough. He spoke to Pacifica’s Steve Zeltzer.
***
We thank all of Pacifica’s sister stations and affiliates who contribute to the production of this show. Today’s program was produced by the Capitalism, Race & Democracy collective, with contributions from JR Valrey and Steve Zeltzer.
Host: Ann Garrison
Editor: Polina Vasiliev
You can find this and all previous episodes at our website “capitalism race and democracy dot ORG”. Make sure you click the subscribe button. Follow us on X, formerly Twitter, @PacificaCRD.
Thanks for listening!
Music:
Locksmith – “America” (Official Video)
Mos Def, “Can U C The Pride in The Panther?”
Kill the Autocrat, “Gimme More” … See MoreSee Less

USAID and US Foreign Policy in Latin America; DOGE Shuts Down AFL-CIO Solidarity Center; Mutual Aid Campaign for Veteran Black Panthers in California; Tesla Worker Quits, Speaks Out – Pacifica Radio's Capitalism, Race and Democracy

capitalismraceanddemocracy.org

  Block Report Radio’s JR Valrey recently sat down with Obi Egbuna Jr., the External Relations officer of the Zimbabwe-Cuba Friendship Association to discuss the US government’s 63-year blockade …

Worker Solidarity Action Network

5 days ago

It was the deadliest workplace in America. So why didn’t safety regulators shut it down?
Inspectors issued more than 100 safety violations and millions in fines. Yet deaths and injuries continued.
www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2025/osha-workplace-deaths-safety-sawmill/?itid=hp-to…

Inspectors issued more than 100 safety violations and millions in fines. Yet deaths and injuries continued.

PHENIX CITY, ALA.
The police lieutenant sounded unnerved as he stepped inside the old lumber mill. The power was off. The giant saws were quiet. But the smell of fresh sawdust still hung in the humid summer air. In the darkened factory, sunlight streamed through jagged holes in the rusted metal walls as Lt. Marc Cutt walked across a machine that turned logs into lumber.
“Has it been rendered safe?” Cutt asked another police officer as his body camera recorded the scene.
“Safe is a relative term in this place,” the officer responded.
The police knew this place well. So did federal safety inspectors.
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At Phenix Lumber Co., workers had lost fingers, broken bones and been mangled by machines — at least 28 employees had reported injuries since 2010, at a company with only about 50 people on the payroll at a time. Three had died. A medical examiner’s report detailed how just 23 pounds of one employee was recovered after he was caught in a machine. It had reached the point, some former workers said, that they would pray before the start of their $9-an-hour shifts.
Phenix Lumber was the deadliest workplace in America over the past five years. No other office or factory posted a higher rate of work-related fatal incidents per worker, according to a Washington Post analysis of Occupational Safety and Health Administration fatality reports since 2019. The analysis examined deaths by workplace location, rather than by company, using OSHA data on fatalities investigated by the agency, which generally does not cover small farms or federal workers.
OSHA is tasked with ensuring that American work environments are safe. “There’s no way to characterize the history at this workplace as acceptable,” the agency said in a statement.
The story of Phenix Lumber — drawn from thousands of previously undisclosed documents and recordings obtained by The Post, along with interviews with officials and former workers and managers — shows the limits of OSHA’s powers. It cannot shut down companies even after years of repeated violations and penalties, even when workers die. It even lacks the power to ask a judge to do so.

Phenix Lumber, as seen from a drone. Over the past five years, no other office or factory in the United States posted a higher rate of work-related fatal incidents per worker. (Dustin Chambers for The Washington Post)
It can request a shutdown from the court only in rare cases of “imminent danger,” such as a looming roof collapse. Causing the death of a worker by willfully violating safety rules is a misdemeanor under federal law. The maximum sentence is six months in prison, less than the penalty for killing an endangered animal. In the past five years, OSHA sent fewer than 50 cases to the Justice Department for a criminal review, records show, and it’s unclear how many of those were prosecuted.
The agency tried “to use all of the resources we have, all the tools we have” in its pursuit of the lumber mill, said Jim Frederick, who was the No. 2 official at OSHA and a deputy assistant secretary at the Labor Department until January.
Since at least 2003, federal safety inspectors have fined the company nearly $5.3 million. They issued more than 180 citations for health and safety violations, accusing the company of knowingly ignoring workers’ safety “for monetary gain.” A quarter of the violations were deemed “willful,” the most severe category. Phenix Lumber workers told inspectors that they were routinely instructed to put their hands into the jaws of stuck machines to clear jams — without first cutting the power, a clear hazard. And the machines were in such bad shape that they regularly broke down.

OSHA twice forced the company into a program for what regulators deemed “the worst of the worst employers.”
“This must stop,” they repeatedly warned the mill’s owners — one of the wealthiest families in eastern Alabama.
But nothing ever seemed to stop Phenix Lumber. It kept churning out millions of board feet of southern yellow pine for the construction industry from its sawdust-covered valley on the edge of town.
Now, in August 2023, the two police officers reached a red tarp covering a doorway, according to body-cam footage. One of them pulled the tarp aside and pointed. Just below a small balcony stood an auger — a giant metal corkscrew set in an open-faced chute to move wood chips. An hour earlier, James Streetman, a 67-year-old maintenance supervisor, had fallen in while the auger was spinning. Or the auger had unexpectedly kicked on as he stepped across it. No one yet knew. Streetman’s spine was shredded, liver ejected, heart never found, according to an autopsy.
The events leading up to James Streetman’s fatal accident
Surveillance and body-camera video reveal the working conditions surrounding his death.

How a man died at the deadliest workplace in the U.S.
3:56

(Jhaan Elker and Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)
“There ain’t nothing left of him,” the lieutenant said.
He turned to go back inside the mill.
“I hate being in this place, man,” he said.
An attorney for the lumber mill said in a court filing after Streetman’s death that his “negligence proximately contributed to cause the accident resulting in his death.” The company has rejected accusations of wrongdoing in court filings. The Dudley family and a top manager all declined to comment through representatives or did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
But change was finally coming for Phenix Lumber. It would just have nothing to do with federal safety regulators.
Of all his companies, John Menza Dudley loved Phenix Lumber the most.
“I come here at 7 a.m. and leave at 5 p.m. every day,” he once told OSHA investigators.
He didn’t need to. Johnny Dudley, as most people knew him, was one of Alabama’s largest private landowners, according to interviews and real estate records. He developed subdivisions. He owned a local bank.
But Dudley seemed to love the lumber mill he’d bought in the early 1960s, when he was just 23. It had a sawmill, a planer mill and a boiler to dry out the wood.
Dudley was one of those old-timers who “had sawdust in their veins,” said Jerry Schwarzauer, a former longtime manager. “It was his one passion.”
He was so closely tied to the mill that some in town called it Dudley Lumber.
For years, Phenix Lumber had a reputation as a place to land a quick job, former workers said. The work was hard and hot. It was dangerous.
“Folks say y’all crazy as hell working up there,” said David Lee, who worked at the mill for years. But it was a job with a steady paycheck.

Mill employee David Lee in Phenix City. (Todd C. Frankel/The Washington Post)
There was a constant stream of new faces — so many that managers often didn’t know their names or exactly what their jobs were, according to OSHA reports and interviews. Workers were fired quickly. New hires arrived just as fast, mostly by word of mouth and sometimes just out of jail, former employees said.
Phenix Lumber was always “a little bit slack” about safety, said Schwarzauer, the former manager. He said that he would argue with workers all the time about “simple things” like wearing required hard hats and safety glasses, but that “the other supervisors didn’t care about that stuff.”
Safety guards, which protect workers from getting entangled in equipment, were left off machines, according to inspection reports and interviews. Tools were left on the ground. These were the types of safety lapses that inspectors noted.
The mill was also in poor condition. OSHA officials noted repeatedly that the facility was “in a state of significant disrepair” and that “virtually no preventative maintenance is performed.” This contributed to machines breaking and jamming, and workers getting hurt trying to fix them.
OSHA considers working in a sawmill “one of the most dangerous occupations.” Heavy logs and giant saws pose constant threats, leading to the development of the kinds of protocols OSHA found lacking at Phenix. There are only about 1,900 OSHA and state workplace safety inspectors in the United States, so they can’t inspect each of the nation’s more than 8 million workplaces. But OSHA started making almost yearly visits to Phenix Lumber two decades ago after a mix of safety complaints and injury reports.
Safety investigators seemed stunned by the company’s repeated refusal to follow “lock out, tag out” procedures for maintenance and repairs. Before workers try to fix a machine, safety protocols require them to turn it off and secure the power source with a personal lock so it can’t be accidentally turned back on. It’s a common industrial practice. OSHA says it prevents 120 deaths and 50,000 injuries annually.
Police arrive to investigate Streetman’s death
Police enter the sawmill and survey the working conditions.

(Obtained by The Washington Post)
In 2009, under pressure from OSHA, Dudley agreed to hire the mill’s first safety consultant, according to agency records.
Months later, a worker was killed.
Doug Broadwater was Dudley’s right-hand man. He had worked at the mill since 1999, running the planer mill and eventually the entire plant.
In May 2010, Broadwater gathered three workers to help him replace a burned-out motor, according to OSHA reports and interviews. The mill couldn’t run without it and had been shut down for two hours.
Workers had removed the old motor and now they needed to install the new one, which weighed more than 500 pounds. It was a tricky job. Broadwater drove a forklift with a chain wrapped around a metal boom to drop the motor into place. He struggled to see where it was going. The workers yelled and flashed hand signs to guide him. Raise the forks, he said they told him. He tried hitting the controls. Nothing. The forklift seemed stuck.
“Something is wrong,” Broadwater recalled telling them, according to OSHA records.
He lowered the boom as two workers tried to push the motor into place. Then the boom and motor “jumped up several inches,” crushing the head of a worker named Charles Mercer between the motor and a steel support beam, according to an OSHA investigation.
Mercer, 57, had worked at the mill on and off for years. Folks called him Muffie Dog. He walked over to sit on a plastic bucket as blood poured from his mouth and nose — his left eye shut, his cheek with a “pressed-down indentation,” according to Broadwater. Co-workers called for an ambulance.
“While we waited,” Broadwater later told investigators, “we finished the job of putting the motor in place.”
The mill was back in operation the next day.
Mercer lingered in the hospital for six days before he died.
OSHA cited the mill for a series of problems related to the death, including using an unapproved, jury-rigged hoist and allowing Mercer to stand under the lift’s forks. It also cited the company for dangers raised years earlier that were never fixed.

The investigation of Charles Mercer's death in May 2010 included an OSHA inspector's photos and handwritten notes detailing where the fatality occurred at Phenix Lumber. (OSHA)
A week after Mercer’s funeral, a worker broke his back in a 10-foot fall through a hole in a platform while working on the debarking machine. Regulators said the mill failed to provide a safety harness that could have prevented the accident — despite a warning from OSHA.
The agency combined its inquiries into that incident and Mercer’s death, announcing the results via press release: “OSHA fines Alabama lumber company for violations following worker death.” The agency asked for a $439,400 fine for 53 citations.
The fine sounded significant, but OSHA’s penalties have remained the same since 1990, except for inflation adjustments. Even today, the top penalty OSHA can hand out for a willful violation is about $165,000 — less than half the maximum daily fine for a Clean Water Act violation. “Fines are higher for killing fish than killing workers,” said former OSHA administrator David Michaels, who served under Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.
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OSHA’s enforcement powers have changed little since its creation in 1971, lagging behind those of other regulators. For instance, the Mine Safety and Health Administration can shut down an operation to protect workers’ lives. Efforts to give OSHA that power — along with other tools — have regularly been defeated in Congress amid fierce complaints from industry officials and conservative politicians about the agency’s “overreach and skewed priorities.”
Just last year, Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill held a hearing to showcase complaints about OSHA. Business groups also pushed to have the Supreme Court hear a case aimed at curtailing the agency’s powers. The justices ultimately declined to take it up, but Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a dissent that OSHA’s creation “may be the broadest delegation of power to an administrative agency found in the United States Code.”
A couple of months after announcing the fine tied to Mercer’s death, the agency discovered that Phenix Lumber no longer had a safety consultant. Schwarzauer was given the duty.
“Nobody else wanted to do it,” he said.
He couldn’t keep up with the number of problems at the mill, he said.
Within months, various workers complained to OSHA that they were being forced by supervisors to clear jams with the power still on. OSHA opened another investigation. In early 2011, a worker needed 30 stitches in his hand after reaching into a jammed machine that suddenly turned back on.
The next day, just as an OSHA official arrived in Phenix City to investigate that injury, another worker lost a finger. He was trying to fix a jammed machine that lacked a safety guard, records show.
Phenix Lumber had been cited repeatedly for failing to follow the lockout procedures since 2007. Managers “intentionally disregarded” the requirements and “exhibited plain indifference” to the hazards, an agency administrative judge ruled in 2011.
“I don’t get involved in the lockout process,” Dudley told investigators shortly after the back-to-back worker injuries, according to an interview transcript. “I rely completely on my managers to do that for me.”
They didn’t always follow the rules, a manager named Donnie Holloway told investigators.
“Our job is to keep the mill running and not let the mill be down any longer than we have to,” he said, arguing that it required five steps to fix what he called a “two-second jam.”
“It would take just too long to do that,” Holloway said.

Phenix Lumber, as seen from the street in August 2024. (Dustin Chambers for The Washington Post)
Broadwater tried to reassure OSHA, according to agency records. “Mr. Dudley is more concerned about safety now than in the past,” he said.
“I don’t know why Mr. Dudley didn’t take safety seriously before (now) other than production,” he continued. “That has always been his primary concern. He doesn’t like to see the mill down and not in production.”
Broadwater also blamed employees, saying that “they are lazy and don’t want to” follow the rules.
During a surprise OSHA visit to the mill in December 2010, investigators discovered managers distributing locks to workers. One worker reported that a manager had told him to “be sure to lock out the sorter (machine) because OSHA is here today.”
OSHA fined the company a little more than $1 million for more than a dozen violations, including 13 willful ones, for the continued problems with the lockout program.
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In June 2011, OSHA issued a new press release that rolled together the two penalties that had been assessed months apart, announcing “more than $1.9 million in fines against Alabama lumber mill.”
Phenix Lumber appealed the fine, with Dudley pleading poverty, and several months later an administrative law judge reduced that headline-grabbing figure to $300,000 and gave him five years to make payments, court records show.
Later that year, OSHA added Phenix to the rolls of its then-new Severe Violator Enforcement Program, which publicized the names of companies that “have demonstrated indifference” to worker safety standards. The companies got three years of additional scrutiny and inspections.
Still, the mill’s workers kept getting hurt. In one particularly bad year, 2015, one worker suffered a head wound. Another broke his ankle. A worker broke his shin. Another was seriously burned.
The mill’s reputation among residents for dangerous conditions cast doubt on a worker’s fatality in early 2019. Kenneth Cotton Sr., 58, was found dead on a sawmill catwalk with a gash to his head.
“There were just so many accidents up there,” said his son, Kenneth Cotton Jr., who also had worked at the mill.
Russell County Coroner Arthur “PeeWee” Sumbry recalled struggling to tell whether Cotton Sr. had slipped or tripped: “Was it an accident or was it negligence?” An autopsy ruled that Cotton had succumbed to heart disease.

Elsie Cotton, whose husband Kenneth Cotton died at the plant in 2019, stands outside the worksite. (Dustin Chambers for The Washington Post)

Elsie Cotton shows a photo of her and her husband. (Dustin Chambers for The Washington Post)
The next year, another worker died.
Brandon Lee Vandyke, 34, was the mill’s overnight maintenance man. His job was to make sure that the machines feeding wood chips into the boiler — which ran 24 hours a day — didn’t get jammed.
Vandyke, originally from Indiana, was working to get his life back on track after years of struggling to hold down a job. He was inspired by his young daughter, whose name, Braelynn, was tattooed across his chest.
“He was trying to start from the bottom and work his way up,” said his brother, Troy Vandyke.
Just before sunrise on May 27, 2020, a neighbor heard an alarm blaring from Phenix Lumber. The wood chips were no longer reaching the boiler. Vandyke usually responded within minutes. Worried, the neighbor walked over to the sawmill and looked for Vandyke near a giant wood-chip silo. The auger often jammed, forcing workers to climb inside and shovel the fuel into the boiler.
He looked inside the silo. He saw a disembodied arm.
A dim, crowded space
Additional body-camera footage shows the crowded conditions inside the sawmill.

(Obtained by The Washington Post)
Rescuers collected what they could of Vandyke’s remains, records show. Most of them were never found. He had suffered “multiple chopping injuries,” according to an autopsy.
In OSHA’s eyes, Vandyke’s death was part of a familiar pattern. He shouldn’t have been inside the silo alone, at night, without the power fully shut down, inspectors said. They noted years of citations issued to Phenix Lumber for failing to train workers and ignoring safety protocols. “These failures directly attributed to the fatal injuries suffered by Brandon Vandyke,” OSHA’s investigation found.

An OSHA photo taken at Phenix Lumber one day after the May 27, 2020, death of Brandon Lee Vandyke. (OSHA)
Phenix Lumber was fined more than $370,000.
After a short closure to make repairs following Vandyke’s death, the mill was back in business.
In August 2022, a few months after the fine was announced, Dudley died at age 85. Some former mill workers were shocked when a county commissioner later suggested honoring Dudley with a publicly funded statue.
The mill’s operations fell to Dudley’s daughter, Leslie Greene, according to interviews. His son, John Menza Dudley Jr., ran the local bank.
Broadwater continued to run the mill day-to-day, workers said.
David Weber started working at Phenix Lumber a few months after the elder Dudley died, in early 2023.

David Weber, who found Streetman after the accident. (Dustin Chambers for The Washington Post)
Weber had worked in construction and at a paper mill, and he was surprised by what he saw at Phenix Lumber.
“They never locked out, tagged out anything,” he said. No one used harnesses to prevent falls. Hard hats and safety glasses seemed optional. Machines kept breaking down.
He had seen giant circular saws break apart, sending metal shards to blow tiny holes in the mill’s metal walls, Weber said. Employees learned to duck when the saws let out a peculiar scream.
Weber, 28, worked in maintenance under Streetman, who was known as Jimbo. Weber said Streetman walked with a stiff gait, like he had a crick in his neck, but he was always smiling and talking about his young granddaughter.
In August 2023, on a sweltering summer afternoon, Weber was helping Streetman clear a jam from the sawmill’s wood chipper. The spinning metal fan crushed wood scraps into smaller chips, which were then moved by the auger up along the building.
Streetman suspected the problem was in a pipe higher up in the mill. He walked inside and over a catwalk to reach an elevated doorway, covered by a red tarp, that led to the balcony over the auger. Security camera footage shows the auger beginning to spin. Then an object moves out of the shadows and onto a platform alongside the spinning auger. It was a leg.
Weber, following minutes behind Streetman, remembered pulling the red tarp aside, stepping onto the balcony and looking into the auger. He ran inside shouting, hysterical.
“I just found somebody’s leg over here,” a co-worker told a 911 operator. “I don’t know where the rest of him is.”
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"Phenix Lumber Company. [Need an] ambulance immediately … Sawmill. Got a man hung in the auger … There was somebody's leg. I just found somebody's leg over here. I don't know where the rest of him is."
Authorities swarmed the mill. One officer said the scene reminded him of the horror movie “Final Destination.” Another officer, Lt. Kristi Anglin, said just the smell of sawdust reminded her of Vandyke’s death three years earlier.
“There’s always someone dying here,” Anglin said.
Another police officer questioned Broadwater.
“Do you have any idea how this could’ve happened?”
“I do not,” Broadwater said, recorded on the officer’s body cam. “I can’t logically imagine why he stepped — he had to step over and he crawled over a handrail to start with to get out there.”
The site of the Streetman’s accident
Police investigate the auger where Phenix Lumber Co. worker James Streetman died. His body was recovered "in pieces."

(Obtained by The Washington Post)
Weber and other workers knew why. They told investigators it was the only way to reach the pipe that often got clogged with wood chips, and it wasn’t unusual to make that maneuver. Workers also told police that the power was rarely locked out when they did it.
Usually, no one got hurt.
That day, the auger kicked back on.
A couple of hours later, after being interviewed by police, Weber ran into Broadwater at the mill.
“You coming back tomorrow?” Weber said Broadwater asked him.
Weber quit on the spot.
Several months after Streetman died, OSHA cited Phenix Lumber for 22 willful violations related to his death. It blasted the company for a “willful disregard for safety” and fined it nearly $2.5 million — among OSHA’s largest penalties for a single incident in a decade.
“This must stop,” said a senior OSHA official in a press release announcing the fine, echoing the same phrase the agency used in 2010 after Mercer’s death.
The Justice Department launched an investigation into both Vandyke’s and Streetman’s deaths, according to an August 2023 letter from a government attorney to the mill’s managers. A department spokesman declined to comment. Weber said he testified before a federal grand jury over the summer. The results of that inquiry have not been announced.
Phenix City police presented Streetman’s death to a local grand jury, which declined to indict anyone, said Russell County District Attorney Rick Chancey.
Phenix Lumber was free to operate after Streetman’s death. It didn’t need to make any changes while it appealed OSHA’s findings.
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But it ran into an unexpected problem: city code officials.
Mayor Eddie Lowe said he struggled to understand how OSHA had allowed Phenix Lumber to stay open despite its years of problems. But when it came to the mill, “I stayed in my lane,” he said.
That changed after city firefighters responding to Streetman’s death noticed a plastic pipe hooked to a yellow fire hydrant on the property, according to city officials. The mill appeared to be illegally tapping city water.
A municipal investigation calculated that the mill owed Phenix City nearly $3.8 million in water and sewage fees — more than what Phenix Lumber had paid OSHA in fines over the years.
City officials then took a step federal regulators couldn’t: They issued a cease-and-desist order that immediately closed down Phenix Lumber. The lumber mill couldn’t reopen until the building and fire codeproblems — such as the lack of proper permits and a sprinkler system — were fixed and the city was paid for the allegedly stolen water.
Negotiations dragged on for weeks. In December, three months after Streetman’s death, the two sides clashed at a City Council meeting. Bill Finley, an attorney for the mill, said the city’s cease-and-desist letter was “not a pro-business decision.” He said Phenix Lumber had “hired folks that other folks won’t hire.” Now, those people would be out of work, and Christmas was right around the corner. If word got out about what city leaders did to Phenix Lumber, he said, he doubted other companies would come to town.
“I’m just going to be honest and frank,” Mayor Lowe said. “When it comes to safety, that has to be the number one thing for any council. And I’ve heard and seen some disturbing things, and for that reason, I can’t table it.”

Phenix City Mayor Eddie Lowe. (Dustin Chambers for The Washington Post)
The mayor and City Council voted unanimously to revoke Phenix Lumber’s business license.
The mill closed. Months passed. Dudley’s heirs fought over his estate in court. The legal cases against Phenix Lumber in the workers’ deaths slowly worked their way through the courts. In the meantime, Phenix City officials drove by the lumber mill to make sure the water was still off and no one was working.
Last month, Phenix Lumber filed for bankruptcy. The company painted a dire financial picture, with assets of less than $50,000 and liabilities of more than $50 million. That included $2.47 million in OSHA penalties in Streetman’s death and $3.78 million for its unpaid municipal water and sewer bill.
Andrew Van Dam contributed to this report. … See MoreSee Less

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OSHA issued over 180 citations and millions in fines to this Alabama sawmill, the deadliest workplace in America, but the mayhem didn’t stop.

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5 days ago

Utah Bans Collective Bargaining for Public Workers
Utah joined two other states in prohibiting collective bargaining for teachers, police officers and other public employees in a move that was seen as a possible blow to the country’s labor movement.
www.nytimes.com/2025/02/15/us/utah-public-workers-collective-bargaining.html
Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah wearing a suit and tie.
The law signed by Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah goes into effect on July 1. Credit…Pool photo by Isaac Hale
Orlando Mayorquín.png
By Orlando Mayorquín
Feb. 15, 2025
A new law signed by Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah prohibits unions from negotiating wages and other terms for teachers, firefighters, police officers and all other public employees, joining just two other states that have banned collective bargaining in the public sector.

The law, which goes into effect on July 1, could have broader implications for the country’s labor movement, experts said. Its signing comes weeks after the new presidential administration effectively paralyzed — at least temporarily — the federal agency responsible for protecting workers’ rights as part of a broader crackdown on federal spending and regulations.

The bill, which was passed by a Republican-controlled Legislature, was signed on Friday by the Republican governor over the pleas of unions representing employees across the public sector, who protested at rallies and spoke in opposition during debate on the Legislature floor.

Federal law protects the collective bargaining rights of workers in the private sector, but determining labor law for public employees is up to the states.

That’s why bargaining rights for public employees vary by state, with some offering stronger protections for workers and unions and others restricting the kinds of workers who can unionize. In Texas, for example, only police and firefighters can collectively bargain. But only two states, North Carolina and South Carolina, had banned collective bargaining outright.

“It’s at the extreme end of the spectrum to have banned it for all,” said Sharon Block, the executive director of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School.

The strongest opposition came from the Utah Education Association, the state’s teachers’ union that represents about 18,000 members. The organization had worked with lawmakers to arrive at a compromise, but the Legislature ultimately moved forward with a version of the bill the association had rejected.

In a statement, the governor said he was disappointed that “the process did not ultimately deliver the compromise that at one point was on the table and that some stakeholders had accepted.”

The education association called the law a “blatant attack on public employees and our right to advocate for the success of our profession and students.”

In a letter to the governor, the association’s president, Renée Pinkney, urged Governor Cox to veto the bill, saying it was intended to “silence educators and their collective voice,” diminishing not just their ability to negotiate salaries and working conditions, but also their say in policies affecting the classroom.

Proponents of the law in Utah argued that labor unions were inherently political and that allowing them to do collective bargaining on behalf of public employees presented a conflict of interest and could burden the taxpayer.

“So ultimately, if the government were to negotiate a really bad deal, at the end of the line it’s the taxpayers who have to pay the cost,” said Jordan Teuscher, a Republican state representative who cosponsored the bill, at a hearing.

Orly Lobel, the director of the Center for Employment and Labor Policy at the University of San Diego, said the Utah law was “a strong antilabor signal and is compounded with national pressures to reduce public spending on education and other public services.”

After Virginia partly repealed its law in 2020 prohibiting collective bargaining in the public sector, those in the labor movement had hoped for a favorable trend, Ms. Block said.

Now, Utah may have offset that.

The law, coupled with the Tump administration’s recent firings at the National Labor Relations Board, has caused concern, Ms. Block said.

“So private sector workers in this country now have no enforceable right to engage in collective bargaining,” Ms. Block said.

“And if you start adding on top of that, states taking away the rights of the public sector workers to engage in collective bargaining, you get to a point where that’s an incredibly serious threat to the labor movement,” she added.
Orlando Mayorquín is a breaking news reporter, based in New York, and a member of the 2023-24 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.More about Orlando Mayorquín … See MoreSee Less

Utah Bans Collective Bargaining for Public Workers

www.nytimes.com

Utah joined two other states in prohibiting collective bargaining for teachers, police officers and other public employees in a move that was seen as a possible blow to the country’s labor movement.