The 50 Most Influential EHS Leaders

THE UNION EHS LEADERS

Peg Seminario, director OHS, AFL-CIO, began working for the organization in 1977. Since then, Seminario has established herself as a strong labor activist, participating in a wide range of regulatory and legislative initiatives, including air contamination regulations, legislative reform of the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act and 20 OSHA rulemakings, including those on benzene, beryllium, lead, hazard communication, hearing conservation, formaldehyde, asbestos, air contaminants, respiratory protection, grain handling, hazardous waste operations and ergonomics.

Scott Schneider, CIH, is division director of Occupational Health and Safety for the Laborers' Health and Safety Fund of North America. For the past 19 years, Schneider has been doing occupational safety and health work for the Labor Movement, including 5 years as ergonomics program director for the AFL-CIO's Center to Protect Workers' Rights.

Eric Frumin is the health and safety coordinator for Change to Win, a 5.5-million member partnership of five unions: the Service Employees International Union, United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Laborers' International Union of North America and United Farm Workers of America. He is a leading national trade union spokesperson on issues of job safety, health and disability, including OSHA standard setting and enforcement, and occupational disease and injury surveillance.

Mike Wright has held the position of director of health, safety and the environment for United Steelworkers of America since 1983. Much of his career has focused on the issue of workplace hazard communication, with his other areas of expertise being risk communication, industrial hygiene and occupational and environmental health. Wright has requested and participated in numerous NIOSH Health Hazard Evaluations on behalf of workers he represents.

Joel Shufro is executive director, the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH), a non-profit coalition of 200 local unions and more than 400 individual workers, physicians, lawyers and other health and safety activists. The coalition is part of a nation-wide network of 25 union-based safety and health organizations.

THE RESEARCHERS AND ACADEMICS

Celeste Monforton is an assistant research professor, the George Washington University's Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, and regular contributor to the public health blog, The Pump Handle. She probably is best known for scouring the fine print in public records to discover that U.S. Labor Department officials were preparing to gut longstanding worker protections, and for meeting surreptitiously with miners to learn how company officials concealed asbestos and other hazards when federal inspectors were coming. In 2006, following the Sago Mine disaster in Kentucky that killed 12 coal miners, she paused her doctoral research to assist the investigation launched by the state's governor.

Joseph Grenny is the coauthor of the New York Times bestsellers Crucial Conversations, Crucial Confrontations and Influencer. David Maxfield is the coauthor of Influencer. Grenny and Maxfield surveyed more than 1,600 frontline workers, managers and safety directors across 30 safety-conscious organizations in 2009 to discover the crucial conversations that drive workplace safety. Their research also calculated the organizational cost of avoiding those crucial safety conversations, discovering that employees waste an average of $1,500 and an 8-hour workday for every crucial conversation they avoid.

Erich J. (Pete) Stafford is executive director of the Center for Construction Research and Training, formerly known as The Center to Protect Workers' Rights (CPWR). NIOSH recently announced a 5-year, $25 million co-operative agreement award to be given to the center, which was created by the Building and Construction Trades Department, AFL-CIO. The center includes both internal researchers and a university-based consortium involving nine different academic partners. NIOSH intends for the center to directly link to the diverse construction community, to serve as a leader in applied construction research, and to diffuse and disseminate effective interventions in the construction industry.

THE LEGISLATORS

In September 2009, following the death of Senator Ted Kennedy, Sen. Thomas Harkin (D-Iowa) became chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee. As a young senator, Harkin was tapped by Kennedy to craft legislation to protect the civil rights of millions of Americans with physical and mental disabilities. What emerged from that process would later become Harkin's signature legislative achievement — the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the first woman to represent Washington state in the U.S. Senate, is chair of the HELP Subcommittee on Employment and Workplace Safety. Along with Sen. Ted Kennedy, she introduced the Protecting America's Workers Act in the Senate. She continues to use her oversight role with the Subcommittee on Employment and Workplace Safety to protect workers at the workplace and to continue to fight for workers' rights to organize and collectively bargain.

Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor, and Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif, chair of the Workforce Protections Subcommittee, have kept worker safety and health legislation moving forward. The two recently called on the nation's coal mine operators to redouble efforts to ensure that miner safety is a top priority. In addition, the Workforce Protections Subcommittee of the House Education and Labor Committee held a hearing on a proposal to strengthen protections for workers who blow the whistle on dangerous workplace conditions, and guarantee a voice for families of workers killed, and those who are seriously injured or become ill on the job.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., and Reps. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., and Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., in April introduced the Safe Chemicals Act in both houses of Congress. If passed and signed into law, the legislation will overhaul the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 (TSCA) and the way the federal government protects the public from toxic chemicals. The Safe Chemicals Act requires safety testing of all industrial chemicals and puts the burden on industry to prove that chemicals are safe in order stay on the market.

You! Every EHS professional has the potential to impact the practice of EHS, not only at their facility, but the entire profession. As Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful people can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”