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School district to pay $193,000 to janitor punished for warning of asbestos exposures at city school

District violated janitor’s whistleblower rights, protections after raising safety concerns

U.S. Department of Labor, June 29, 2016

Federal investigators have determined a Michigan janitor was labeled a troublemaker and subjected to a continuing litany of adverse personnel actions by the Dearborn Heights School District after she complained about exposure to asbestos while cleaning school floor tiles.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration found the school district violated the whistleblower provisions of the Clean Air Act, and has ordered the district to pay the worker a total of $193,139 in back wages, damages and other compensation.

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Italian businessman and former Industry Minister sentenced to jail over Olivetti asbestos deaths

MILAN (Reuters) — An Italian court sentenced one of the country’s best-known businessmen, Carlo De Benedetti, and a former industry minister to jail on Monday in a long-running case over the asbestos-related deaths of former workers of electronics group Olivetti.

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Asbestos deaths in Alberta higher than reported, says Calgary prof

A professor at the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine believes the number of asbestos-related workplace deaths in Alberta is much higher than formally acknowledged.

By Dan McGarvey, CBC News, July 16, 2016

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City To Pay For Asbestos Remediation

By Carol Thomson, Saskatoon News, July 19,  2016

The City of Saskatoon will take care of getting rid of the asbestos in the former Mendel Art Gallery building on Spadina, before handing it over to the Children’s Discovery Museum.

Board Chair of the museum, Dave Hunchak, says they have been in discussions about who will take care of what, and the City agreed to hand over a facility free of asbestos at a cost of approximately $700-thousand.

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Italy: Constitutional Court OKs fresh trial in 258 Eternit asbestos deaths

(ANSA) – Rome, July 21 – The Constitutional Court on Thursday green-lit a multiple manslaughter trial against Swiss tycoon Stephan Schmidheiny for the asbestos deaths of 258 workers at four Eternit cement plants while he owned the company. In 2012 he was found guilty of negligence at the now-defunct Eternit’s Italian factories in the 1970s and 1980s and sentenced to 18 years in prison, but Italy’s highest Cassation Court overturned the verdict in November 2014 on the grounds that the case had timed out.

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