Employment At-Will
Bill Williams
Strayer University
LEG /500
May 5, 2015
Prof. Robert Poydasheff

This chapter begins with perspectives on work-related risks—both the avoidable and the unavoidable. The legal backdrop includes the watershed Occupational Health and Safety Act of 1970, embodying a national policy to reduce or prevent occupational harms, and laws designed to compensate those who suffer them. In the final section we explore the twenty-first-century global dimensions of workplace health and safety. Throughout, we pay particular attention those who are most vulnerable.
Confronting Risk in the Work Environment:
The WTC Cleanup
In November 2004, an Army National Guard medic filed a class action against the Environ- mental Protection Agency (EPA), the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) on behalf of all those who worked in the immediate vicinity of the World Trade Center from September 11, 2001 to October 31, 2001. The court must decide if those allegations are enough to allow plaintiffs to move to the next step—a trial.
The collapse of the World Trade Center towers on [September 11, 2001] generated a cloud of debris that coated the surrounding buildings and streets of Lower Manhattan with concrete dust, asbestos, lead, and other building materials. Fires within the wreck- age burned for months, emitting various metals and particulate matter in addition to such potentially harmful substances as dioxin, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), volatile organic compounds, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
At the beginnings of the second decade of the twenty-first century, Americans were made painfully aware of the hazardous nature of the work that provides the energy to run our economy. In February 2010, six workers were killed in an explosion at the Kleen Energy Plant in