The Chipotle restaurant chain gets some of its food from Taylor Fresh Foods, apparently the world's biggest name in pre-cut produce and pre-packed salad -- but also a big name in workplace injuries, chemical spills, and surveillance of and retaliation against workers. Taylor's Tracy, CA facility has faced some 70 citations for state health and safety violations over the past year, including a chemical spill that sent 20 employees (two of them pregnant!) to the hospital. The NLRB has also hit Taylor (and its associated temp agencies) for over 50 violations, including the one that prompted Taylor to announce it would pay some former employees over $260,000 in back pay (which, of course, we'd like to see them actually do). Did I mention that Tracy facility workers have been trying to organize, or Taylor's numerous recalls for possible e. coli and salmonella contaminations? And Chipotle itself has been whacked with the Big Stick of Bad PR over contamination and illness at its restaurants, so the International Labor Rights Forum helps you helps you tell Chipotle to induce better behavior from Taylor Fresh Foods.
Meanwhile, Western Pennsylvania suffers from poor air quality and the rising rates of asthma and cancer that go with it, but Royal Dutch Shell has decided to build a giant ethane cracker plant near the Ohio River in Beaver County anyway. You may recall that the Corbett Administration handed out a $1.7 billion (over 25 years) tax break for Royal Dutch Shell back in 2012, in the hope that Pennsylvania wouldn't lose a "bidding war" with Ohio and West Virginia over the facility and the jobs it would supposedly bring. (Estimates ranged from 400 to 10,000 jobs in 2012, but I'd bet the actual number would be near the low end.) Ethane cracker plants convert oil and gas to polyethylene, which manufacturers use in many, many products, but these plants also spew forth a lot of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. VOCs are organic only because they contain carbon, and they not only exacerbate climate change, but they also combine with nitrogen oxides to create smog, which exacerbates the kind of health problems described above. So MoveOn helps you tell the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to reject the Shell ethane cracker plant.
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