There's an interesting piece in Slate this week about lab safety (or the lack thereof) in academic settings relative to their corporate counterparts. The author may be familiar to some - Beryl Lieff Benderly writes for Science's Next Wave.

The article describes an awful chem lab accident at UCLA and then goes on to point out that non-employees (i.e. grad students and postdocs) don't fall under the workplace safety laws that cover corporate labs. The article claims that the safety standards in academic labs are quite poor, and many in the discussion forum concur.

Lab safety sounds like yet another good reason to classify postdocs as employees rather than leaving them in their current murky state.