For the second time in the past few days, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has launched an investigation into a chemical plant explosion in Louisiana. On Thursday, a plant in Geismar, La., exploded, killing one person and injuring 73. On Friday, a blast in Donaldsonville, La., killed one person and injured seven. The plant that exploded on Thursday hadn't been inspected by OSHA in 20 years. It is not yet known when the last inspection was done at the Donaldsonville plant.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has launched an investigation into working conditions at Sewon America's LaGrange, Ga., facility after an employee, Teresa Weaver Pickard, died after allegedly being forced to work in extreme heat. Sewon, a company that provides auto parts to Kia, denies Pickard's death was work-related, but an anonymous source at the plant has disputed Sewon's account of the tragedy.

Early this morning an explosion and fire occurred at the Williams Olefins chemical plant in Geismar, La., the local news reported. 

At least 73 people are reported injured and person was killed, according to ABC News. 

Fire, ambulance and rescue teams are at the scene. 

More details to follow. 

Following the tragic building collapse that killed more than 1,300 Bangladeshi garment workers and recent fires that have claimed the lives of more than 400 Bangladeshi clothing workers, more than 40 clothing retailers have signed on to the Accord on Building and Fire Safety. But two of the major retailers that count on low-wage Bangladeshi workers to make the clothes they sell have refused.

Today. Walmart and Gap announced they would develop their own nonbinding safety code and turned their backs on the accord developed by international and Bangladeshi unions, retailers and other groups—groups with firsthand knowledge of what’s needed for worker safety and of the deadly consequences of inaction.

CBS News secretly filmed inside a Bangladesh apparel factory recently. There they found emergency fire doors blocked and just two fire extinguishers for a 100,000-square-foot area—another 11 shown on an evacuation plan were nowhere to be seen. Recent fires have claimed the lives of more than 400 Bangladeshi clothing workers.

A coalition of faith organizations, investors and labor groups—including the AFL-CIO—is urging major U.S. retailers, including Walmart, Gap, Sears and others, to sign on to a binding workplace and fire safety plan to prevent tragedies such as the recent building collapse in Bangladesh that killed more than 1,100 garment workers and two 2012 fires that claimed the lives of more than 400 Bangladeshi clothing workers.  

In January 2012, the Ironworkers launched a new worksite safety campaign, with the goal of “zero fatalities, and the first figures in show that Countdown to Zero” is making a difference and saving lives (see chart inside post).

Today, 150 people will likely be killed on the job or die from job-related illnesses and disease. That deadly toll will continue tomorrow and the next day and the next until the nation “renews the commitment to protect workers from injury, disease and death,” and makes it a high priority, says the 2013 edition of the AFL-CIO’s Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect.

When Bill Brockmiller, president of the Western Wisconsin AFL-CIO, was asked why he and several dozen union and community members and local officials in La Crosse were taking part in Workers Memorial Day ceremonies Sunday, he told WXOW-TV:

You have a right to go to work and earn your daily bread, support your family and come back home at night. So when that doesn't happen, when you lose your life in the pursuit of a paycheck, I think we owe it to those people, and to their family, those they leave behind, to honor that sacrifice.

A century ago on Workers Memorial Day, millions of men, women and children worked long hours at low pay in jobs that threatened their lives and limbs. Many of them were immigrants.

“They don't suffer,” George F. Baer said of coal miners who had come to America from eastern Europe. “Why, hell, half of them don't even speak English."