House Committee Subpoenas Chao
House Education and Labor Committee Chairman Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., has subpoenaed Labor Secretary Elaine Chao because the committee has not received documents it requested from the Department of Labor in conjunction with the Aug. 6 mine disaster at Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah.
According to Miller, the action was “a last resort, to compel and expedite this production of information.” The subpeona demands internal documents sent from the Labor Department to the Crandall Canyon mine owners before and after the tragedy, in which six miners were entombed on Aug. 6. Subsequent rescue efforts claimed the lives of three rescue workers and injured six more.
Job Stress Doubles Heart Trouble
Workers who have suffered heart attacks may want to take it easy on the job. A study in the October issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that heart attack survivors were more likely to have a second heart attack or die of heart disease if they had chronic job strain.
After interviewing 972 men and women between 35 to 59 years of age, who returned to work after a first heart attack, researchers from the Université Laval in Québec, Canada, found that 111 of the participants had suffered a nonfatal heart attack, 82 had unstable angina or chest pain and 13 had fatal heart attacks. Even after factoring in variables such as sex, age, marital status, education, financial status and workplace social support, researchers still found that workplace stress doubled the odds of such heart troubles.
