The House Committee on Education & Labor will hold a field hearing on January 14, 2007: "Workplace Tragedies: Examining Problems and Solutions," scheduled at 2:00 p.m. in the Linden, NJ City Hall. Its Sub-Committee on Work Force Protections, chaired by Lynn Woolsey (CA-06), will focus on recent on-the-job deaths, especially those of Victor & Carlos Diaz who died Dec.1, 2007 while cleaning a 20,000 gallon dilution tank. (Need background? Try prior posts here , here, and here .)The workers (who were not related) had no respiratory protection whatsoever. A key sub-committee member Donald Payne (NJ-10) represents Linden so I spoke to his senior labor staffer, LaVerne Alexander. She said she expected other NJ Congress Members to attend and that experts on confined space safety, union experts and relatives of the families to testify. I also spoke to one union expert, Eric Frumin, who is the Safety & Health Director of Unite-Here – the union seeking to organize the workers at the Linden facility (& its sister operation, New England Linen of Hew Haven Ct.). One alarming aspect of this incident is that the owners/operators of the two plants, had previously been cited for failing to evaluate confined space dangers at their New Haven facility. I asked Frumin about reports about the use of sulfuric acid in the tank. While he had no first hand knowledge of the Linden, NJ operation, he said that – in general – commercial laundries, like this one, use H2SO4 to neutralize their waste water. As a result, he thought the reports of such use in Linden and of hydrogen sulfide in the tank were credible. Aaron Albright, Education & Labor Committee press aide, said that the hearings would also touch the death of Edgar Moreno and the serious injury of his brother Alcides Moreno in the 47-storey fall from Solow Tower on East 66th Street in Manhattan. The Moreno brothers shared a home in Linden. While much attention has been focused on the miraculous survival and recovery of Alcides Moreno who began to speak Christmas Day, less has been given to the causes of the scaffold collapse in which precipitated the 500-foot fall. One odd side issue has emerged: a number of people responding to the flood of “miracle” articles call Alcides Moreno an illegal alien who should be shipped back to Ecuador. (In fact, he’s a US citizen). This underscores to me how keenly felt the injuries, real or imagined, of immigration are; they bubble up spontaneously, without factual basis.