Thursday morning, AIDS Healthcare Foundation will hold another protest publicity stunt at a scheduled meeting of Cal/OSHA in Sacramento, to castigate the agency for a five-year delay in doing AHF’s bidding vis-à-vis regulations concerning adult film production.
In February, Cal/OSHA previewed draft “bloodborne pathogen” regulations for adult film production, but public hearing on the proposed regs was delayed beyond tomorrow’s scheduled meeting of the agency’s Stanards Board.
In attendance at Thursday’s AHF protest will be former adult performers Cameron Bay and Sofia Delgado (neither of whose HIV infection was traceabe to an adult film shoot), as well as AHF’s Adam “Lonelyhearts” Cohen, Dale Gluth, Eric Cartman lookalike Miki Jackson, and “public health consultant” Ava Aguado.
When AHF protested Cal/OSHA’s offices in Los Angeles and Oakland last November, the group utilized paid protesters, many of whom didn’t really know why they were there.
AHF’s November 5, 2014 protest in downtown Los Angeles.
At press time it would appear that they plan to do the same for tomorrow’s protest, as the AHF press release mentions that 50 “advocates” will be in attendance wearing red T-shirts that read, “No More Excuses!”
Someone ought to let AHF dictator Michael Weinstein know that castigating Cal/OSHA is really bad form. Weinstein appears frustrated that Cal/OSHA is only doing 90% of what he wants, and is not working fast enough for his tastes.
“At this point, we are a bit confused. The Cal/OSHA Standards Board is a board appointed by the governor, yet it doesn’t seem to have any real authority. We’ve dutifully gone every month to the meetings, and — despite the fact that OSHA officials say this needs to be done quickly — we are now five-and-a-half years into the process with nothing to show for it. This is not right,” Weinstein bloviated in a press release Wednesday evening.
Cal/OSHA’s proposed regulations are intended to supercede those currently in effect, embodied in California Code of Regulations Title 8 Sec. 5193. Those regs were written for medical clinics and mortuaries back in the 1990s, and mandate “barrier protections” for healthcare workers exposed to blood or infectious materials.
Under Sec. 5193, anything you wouldn’t want to happen to you in the course of your duties in a clinic (such as having someone ejaculate or squirt on you, or penetrate you), became a forbidden “exposure event” in the context of adult film sets — even though such “exposure” constitutes the job itself.
As TRPWL reported on Feb. 3,
Egged on by AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), Cal/OSHA has undertaken to create a brand new code section, Sec. 5193.1, and the latest draft, dated 12-1-2014, makes it crystal clear that what you or I call “porn”, Cal/OSHA calls impermissible “exposure”, requiring detailed documentation and record-keeping, medical follow-up, etc…
AHF will begin Thursday’s protest in front of the California Labor & Workforce Development Agency at 8 a.m., and then move to the Cal/OSHA Standards Board Meeting held at the State Resources Building Auditorium at 10 a.m.
TRPWL will provide coverage.
