As reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis has spent her first few months in office focusing on handing out $46 billion in stimulus money. Now, her department is adding staff and signaling it will soon begin putting in practice the more assertive regulation of business she promised early in her tenure.

Ms. Solis has begun hiring 670 new investigators to enforce labor regulations.

There will be 150 investigators added in the Wage and Hour division to enforce wage rules and child-labor laws. Another 100 staff will be added to ensure contractors on stimulus projects are in compliance with applicable laws. The additions will boost the division’s staff by more than one-third.

The Employee Benefits Security Administration, which helps to regulate private retirement, health and other benefit plans covering 150 million Americans, is adding 75 staffers to conduct nearly 600 more criminal and civil investigations.

Ms. Solis and President Barack Obama also have reversed or postponed some policy decisions made under former President George W. Bush. In April, the labor department postponed a last-minute Bush-era rule that would have required unions to disclose more about their finances. The agency will take more time to consider the rule, which businesses praised and unions said was excessive.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration recently formed a task force to design an enforcement program for severe violators. OSHA will conduct an intensive examination of an employer’s inspection history and any systematic problems would trigger additional, mandatory inspections.

OSHA also launched a program to step up inspections of construction sites in Texas after a series of injuries and fatalities.

“The previous administration was not prone to fight on the side of worker protection and we’re going in that direction to level the playing field,” Ms. Solis said.

Business groups are wary that the playing field will tilt too far, at a time when many businesses are still fighting their way out of economic hard times.

“Employers, especially smaller ones, are really looking for help in terms of understanding the requirements and making sure they’re doing things right,” said Marc Freedman, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s executive director of labor law policy. Instead, the department’s “rhetoric” on workplace safety “seems to be heavy-handed enforcement and generation of more regulations,” he said.

Unions want the agency to get tough on employers and push through new regulations on workplace safety and other issues they say the previous administration ignored.

As part of the federal stimulus program, the administration was allotted $575 million for fiscal 2009 to help train workers who have lost their jobs due to foreign trade, and has distributed more than $470 million since January. The Bush administration was allotted $220 million in such funds for fiscal 2008. In addition, the program was expanded in mid-May to include more types of workers.

The Obama administration is also naming more of the people who will hold senior posts in the Labor Department, few of whom have business backgrounds, a shift from most of former President Bush’s appointees.

M. Patricia Smith, the nominee to be the department’s top lawyer, is commissioner for New York State’s labor department, and is known as a tough regulator who has stepped up worker protection.

Mr. Obama’s nominee to head OSHA, David Michaels, is an epidemiologist and research professor at George Washington University known for studies on the health effects of occupational exposure to toxic chemicals.

(Click to see our collection of Green Products)

Via Cleanlink.com

Traditionally, paper manufacturers only produced virgin fiber paper products — products manufactured from harvested raw materials. But because of the high cost to manufacture these products — virgin fiber requires significant energy for harvesting, pulping and processing — and the political context behind the process, paper manufacturers have begun shifting their efforts towards products and processes that are more sustainable.

Even though most end users enjoy the softness and the high quality that is associated with virgin fiber towel and tissue products, jan/san distributors say the commercial market for the most part is not seeking out these traditional products like in years past. The trend nowadays is to purchase paper products manufactured with recycled content, says Teresa Farmer, green program specialist with Kelsan Inc., Knoxville, Tenn.

“Some of the high-end hotels and resorts may still be looking at virgin paper products, but a lot of customers are going to the recycled content,” she says.

Once considered to be low quality and cost more, recycled paper products are now up to par with their traditional counterparts — quality-wise and price-wise, says David Renard, president of Renard Paper Co., Inc., St. Louis. But some customers still need a little convincing that recycled fiber is comparable to virgin fiber paper products.

“Usually, once we give customers a sample of the recycled fiber and they can actually touch it and feel it, then that changes their minds,” says Farmer. “I think people still have the perception that these products only come in a brown roll towel or come as rough toilet paper. That isn’t the case anymore.”

Advanced technology and education on the part of manufacturers has helped to make recycled paper products more efficient and cost effective. Thus, customers no longer have to compromise quality or cost anymore to do the environmentally sound thing, says Bill McGarvey, director of training and sustainability for Philip Rosenau Co., Warminster, Pa.

It’s up to distributors, however, to help customers understand the environmental benefits between using a recycled fiber paper vs. a virgin fiber paper product — and sort through the terminology that is associated with many eco-friendly paper products today.

Recycled Fibers
Customers often misunderstand where recycled towel and tissue products come from, distributors say. Today’s recycled fiber paper products can be broken down into two categories — recovered fiber and post consumer waste material.

Recovered fiber is generated after the completion of the paper making process, such as post-consumer materials, envelope cuttings, bindery trimmings, printing waste, butt rolls and mill wrappers, obsolete inventories and rejected unused stock.

Post consumer waste materials on the other hand, are finished products that went out into the world and have served that purpose, and then were recovered from or otherwise diverted from the waste stream for the purpose of recycling, says McGarvey.

Today, because of their sustainable claims, recycled fiber products are viewed as a necessary offering across the board.

“Everybody’s got to have a green story to tell and the availability of recycled fiber is greater now than it has ever been,” says McGarvey.

Acceptance has not been a problem either. In fact, when customers are given the option of purchasing a paper product that is either virgin fiber or is recycled, they will more than often choose the recycled paper, says Farmer.

Recycled paper products are now being used in restrooms of office buildings, hotels and restaurants that are looking to go green or achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).

“The knock against the traditional recycled content was that it wasn’t good enough for Class A offices,” says McGarvey. “That’s not the case anymore as the manufacturers have really stepped up over the past few years with greener offerings.”

In fact, in most instances customers can’t tell the difference between products with recycled content and those that are virgin fiber anymore, says Farmer.

“Now you can get recycled paper in white roll towels and the paper just seems to be thicker. You can also get two-ply bathroom tissue and it’s just a softer product,” she says.

Green Certification
With customers looking to become better environmental stewards, paper manufacturers are making it easier to meet those goals. In fact, distributors are ushering customers looking to go green towards paper products that are certified by third-party organizations such as Green Seal and EcoLogo, as well as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Chlorine Free Products Association (CFPA) and the Green Restaurants Association.

These organizations have put these paper products through strict testing, so distributors are ensured that they are selling customers the greenest paper products available. And, by taking the guesswork out of the equation, it also substantiates a facility’s claim that they’re in fact using a green paper product, says Farmer.

Simply because a product uses recycled fiber does not automatically mean that the product is green. It needs to be produced using a specific percentage of post-consumer content and recovered fibers.

In its Comprehensive Procurement Guidelines for Commercial/Industrial Sanitary Tissue Products, the EPA recommends a minimum of 40 percent post-consumer waste content be used in the manufacturing of towels and a minimum of 20 percent for restroom tissue. For a restroom tissue to be certified by Green Seal, the fiber in the product must contain 100 percent recovered materials, including 20 percent post-consumer materials.

Environmentally friendly paper also isn’t bleached using chlorine derivatives. According to the Chlorine Free Products Association, for a recycled content paper product to be certified as “Processed Chlorine Free” it must include all recycled fibers used as a feedstock that meet EPA guidelines for recycled or post-consumer content. Processed Chlorine Free paper has not been rebleached with chlorine containing compounds and a minimum of 30 percent post-consumer content is required.

Green Seal and EcoLogo standards also mandate that towels and tissue cannot be bleached with chlorine or any of its derivatives such as hypochlorite or chlorine dioxide.

Some paper manufacturers claim their towel and tissue products are bleached using an elemental chlorine process — a process thought to be eco-friendly. However, elemental chlorine free differs from processed chlorine free because elemental chlorine free paper products are bleached with a chlorine compound — most often chlorine dioxide, which releases dioxins into the environment. With processed chlorine free, however, both recycled fiber and any virgin fiber used is bleached without chlorine or chlorine derivitatives.

Since most product packaging ends up in the waste stream, how the product is packaged is also a significant component to whether a paper product is considered green. In fact, most third-party organizations mandate that the cores in roll towels and restroom tissue be made from 100 percent recycled materials.

The manufacturing process is also taken into consideration when determining if a product is truly sustainable. EcoLogo, for instance, requires those paper products that have to be manufactured using virgin fiber, to only use fiber harvested under sustainable forest practices.

Paper by-products from manufacturers often end up paving roads, making grass grow or providing a strong foundation for highways. Paper mills use ash from power boilers for road stabilization and building, and farmers and turf growers are benefiting from waste that is turned into fertilizers or grass seed.

On top of purchasing products that are green certified, eco-conscious end users are also concerned about reducing the amount of paper being used — and wasted — in their facilities.

Waste Reduction
For years, the unnecessary disposal of unused tisue from public restrooms has been a major problem. To offset this costly problem for facilities, paper manufacturers introduced a greener product offering — coreless restroom tissue.

“By going coreless, what they’ve done is they made that roll of toilet paper a complete roll,” says McGarvey. “There’s no center to it — it’s not a hollow roll center, so you have a little more paper per roll.”

A major advantage to using coreless tissue is the fact that it reduces waste — there are no wrappers, no cores and fewer stub rolls to discard, says Farmer.

“When people service restrooms, if there’s a stub roll, they’ll pull that off and put on a fresh new roll,” she says. “And at the end of the day, it’s amazing how many stub rolls there are. And so, if they can use every bit of that paper, it saves them a lot of money.”

Even more than toilet tissue, hand towels are a major source of waste and headaches for facilities.

Roll towels are generally preferred over multi-fold towels, but because multi-fold towels are cheaper, more facilities tend to stock these in their restrooms, distributors say.

Even though roll towels may cost more, there’s usually less waste because multi-fold towels tend to fall out, or users pull more out than they need. By getting customers to switch to roll towels dispensed in touchfree dispensers, distributors say facilities are recognizing savings in labor and product usage.

“It’s usually about 25 to 30 percent savings over the multi-fold towels,” says Farmer. “Plus, they don’t have the mess when somebody comes in and they pull one towel out and 10 fall to the floor. A multi-fold towel is going to be cheaper than a roll towel, but when they stop and look at the long-term return on investment, that’s when they start to see.”

Each customer has their own preference of what towel and tissue products they want in their restrooms. However, helping them sort through the terminology may help them find the best fit for their facility and the environment.

By Lisa Ridgely, Via Contracting Profits:

Building service contractors saw it coming, this recession. The writing was on the wall as many as two or three years ago in sectors such as industrial and retail, which began to see a drop in business and had to cut back on cleaning services. Now, nearly all sectors have been affected by the slump in consumer spending and the tightening of the credit market.

But few might have predicted that the economy and customers on the whole would be so hard-hit — shaken to the core in some cases — changing budgetary discretion, spending priorities and cleaning expectations perhaps for good.

“I think this recession is certainly deeper and much more widespread than any other I’ve seen and I’ve been here for 30 years, and I’ve lived through at least four, maybe five, and there are certain things that change after each recession,” says Guy Mingo, president of Marsden Holding LLC in St. Paul, Minn. “This one’s more widespread, really, across the whole economy, not just one sector — not just banking, not just real estate, but everybody was affected.”

Suffering sectors such as finance and banking, the auto industry, construction and real estate may stand out as the most volatile, but regardless of the sector, customer budgets throughout a contractor’s portfolio are shrinking. This has BSCs scrambling to meet demands for price decreases and service reductions.

At a time when customers have less money to work with, they are eliminating some daily cleaning frequencies, reducing routine services and rewriting specs. Though those changes are a temporary fix during a financial crunch, BSCs fear they will remain permanent long after the economy recovers.

“What I’m afraid of and what others are afraid of, is that this will be the new standard,” says Taylor Bruce, president of IH Services in Greenville, S.C. “Nobody a year from now, two years from now, is going to all of a sudden have 25 percent more budget than they’ve got now. It doesn’t work like that. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”
Reductions

Cleaning services are an easy target for financial decision-makers within customer entities. A cleaning contract may rank as important as other big-ticket utility and outsourcing costs, says T.J. Barnes, vice president of Manhattan Maintenance in Fairfield, N.J., but customers can’t cut electricity, and they won’t cut security, so cleaning services — typically perceived as a commodity rather than a necessity — have to take one for the team, so to speak.

Most reductions vary in percentage between 10 and 30 percent, say BSCs.

“The first thing they all say is, ‘We want to cut this price and we don’t want any change in service.’ That’s always the first thing out of somebody’s mouth. And of course you can’t do that,” Bruce says. “None of us in today’s world make margins to be able to do something like that.”

BSCs can either do the best they can to make the cuts required, or agree to reduce specifications, he says. But they can’t afford to say no in such a volatile business environment. As it is, most BSCs are experiencing an increased number of customers going out to bid to secure more competitive bids.

“There’s a lot of fast-moving parts out there today,” Mingo says. “We have accounts that have bid twice in a 12-month cycle. Because they’ve had management changes, and companies have come back and said they need to have a round of cuts. Their projections didn’t turn out to be as good as they thought.”

The first daily services to be reduced are the basic cleaning services, including dusting, vacuuming and even trash pickup. Services performed weekly are now being shifted to once or twice a month, and those performed quarterly are being performed twice a year. But the daily services that are considered most important — the cleaning of common areas such as lobbies and break rooms, restrooms, entrances and anywhere that is a high-traffic area — are still valued.

Where many BSCs are feeling it are in their periodic, add-on services such as floor and carpet care and window washing.

“I think that the periodic services are the first ones to get cut, and I’ve seen a slow deterioration in those, not just in my properties but also in day-to-day things like when I go to the supermarket or a friend’s apartment building.” says Barnes. “Being in this business, you always have your eye on seeing what other people are doing. You see the cutback in services just about every place you go.”

The cutbacks aren’t always just a temporary fix; they’re permanently changed, in writing, in the specifications. Some companies will offer up new specs in a rebid situation, while others will work with contractors on new specs that fit their financial limitations.

“In a lot of cases, they’re working with us to reduce specs and in most scenarios we’re able to avoid an RFP,” says Marc Collings, director of strategic management for Varsity Contractors in Boise, Idaho. “In many other cases, they’re just going out to bid, and a big trend is going towards reverse auctions.”

In extreme cases, customers are closing out BSC contracts for good as organizations attempt to bring cleaning operations in-house.

As workloads are eliminated or reduced, employees are inevitably affected.
Labor considerations

BSCs usually have a mix of full- and part-time positions, based on their clientele’s needs. For many contractors, the ability to offer full-time work is dwindling because of the recent contract cutbacks — and that is having a negative impact on contractors that use hours and pay as incentive to reduce turnover and hang on to good employees.

“I’ve lost staff because of the people that decide to cut services. And I’ve tried to reduce some of those staff to lesser hours but of course they have families just like everybody else so they have to find full-time work,” says Lonnie Williams, president of L&J Building Maintenance in Topeka, Kan.

Barnes has even gone so far as to stop trying for contracts that have cut down to three days a week or less.

“You’re not making any money on it and you’re spending a considerable amount of time running around and dealing with three-day-a-week services and finding people that do them, and then you’ll have a higher turnover rate,” Barnes says.

Whether a market is union-saturated also influences reductions. Smart property managers that know how unions justify staffing are reducing on-site jobs to meet budget demands. Contractors that negotiate with unions are seeing reductions in the scope of work, specifically targeted to eliminate head count, Barnes says.

While there is more contract flexibility in non-union markets, there hasn’t been a huge change from full-time staff to part-time staff, Mingo says, but there have been head count reductions. Other BSCs have had to reduce full-time staff, as they simply don’t have the work to fill a week for employees anymore.

Even though turnover is down for most contractors because of the economy and the need for employees to keep their jobs, it can be hard to fill positions in markets that traditionally offer part-time, daily jobs that do not offer good part-time hours.

“It’s tough because in order to get people gainful employment, they don’t necessarily want to work only two or three days a week, especially with banks,” says Jamie Van Vuren, president of Bee Line Building Service and Supply in Schaumberg, Ill. “A lot of times they’re just working one or two hours anyway, and you try and give people numerous banks to fill it, otherwise you’re paying people much higher dollar hourly wage. So it’s harder to fill those positions.”

Monumental shift

While each BSC experiences these economic times differently, and many are making up for losses in these areas for sales and growth in new ones, most agree that this leaning-down period for customers may permanently change the way cleaning is done. With a focus on prices rather than cleanliness, customers are barely maintaining facilities, let alone investing in them.

“It’s like they’ve all gotten to a maintenance situation instead of an upgrade situation,” Bruce says.

The customers that cut down their cleaning frequencies may never go back to five-day-a-week service, especially if BSCs are doing a good job of cleaning at two or three days a week.

“I think it’s a game-changer,” Mingo says. “I think the industry has lost a portion of its revenue base and it’s going to have to replace it through expansion, taking on more customers, in different territories or increasing or adding vertical sales — probably both — in order to offset that revenue loss that I don’t think will come back.”

A reduction in frequencies opens the door for more maintenance and periodic work in the future to make up for the cleaning that is falling through the cracks. Also, the fact that so many customers are going out to bid is giving contractors the chance to snatch up new customers.

Despite the gloomy economy and volatile markets, savvy BSCs see any alterations in the markets they serve as an opportunity for new business as well. Some markets, after all, aren’t doing poorly. So far this year, the economic situation has kept BSCs busy, challenging them to think creatively, make smart strategic decisions and invest boldly. For many, it’s paying off.

By, Christy Hoppe/Via Dallasnews.com

AUSTIN – Texas health officials are preparing for the double-whammy this fall of the swine flu and the seasonal flu, saying they have better knowledge now about the H1N1 epidemic and can better tackle the illness and the fears about it.

“There was a lot of concern back in spring,” said Dr. David Lakey, commissioner of State Health Services. “Now we have additional information.”

That should preclude the disruption of closing down schools.

On Monday, the state kicked off a series of conferences to be held around the state among state officials, local groups and health care professionals to coordinate monitoring and treatment during the fall and winter flu season.

State officials already have said that they will not be so quick to shutter schools when flu cases occur, but instead urge hand-washing, covering coughs and telling parents to keep sick children at home.

The state has stockpiled enough anti-viral medication to treat about 2.5 million flu sufferers, and the first shipments of vaccinations for both the H1N1 virus and seasonal flu by mid-October, Lakey said.

The dosages will be available in sufficient quantity to provide them to anyone in need, regardless of their ability to pay, he said.

He said information from how the flu has acted thus far will help direct health care treatment.

As of July 31, 5,200 Texans had contracted the H1N1 virus and it has claimed 28 victims. Unlike seasonal flu, which tends to harm the elderly, chronically ill and very young, the new flu strain appeared mostly in school-aged children, those between 5 and 18 years old.

Because cases increase in the fall – the traditional flu season – Lakey said the state is preparing for a steep challenge.

“We’ll have a tough flu season, but not one we can’t deal with,” he said.