Labor Union Blog

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Workers Independent News Labor Radio
Internet Radio Program 04/07/10
Producers: Doug Cunningham & Jesse Russell

Labor Radio Rundown:

1) WIN Newscast – Are union coal mines safer? Ellen Smith, editor of Mine Safety Health News says they are. The Temple University Hospital strike continues and draws more support and workers at Hugo Boss also attract more support in their fight against a plant closing.

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As they head back to the negotiation table after three months of no talks, Hugo Boss factory workers are receiving some additional high profile support. Jesse Russell has more:

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A strike by Temple University nurses and employees continues this morning after the two sides met on Tuesday for the first time since the walk out last week. They’ve been on the lines since March 31 protesting limits on speech, the proposed cut of a college tuition benefit, and a wage increase for nurses of only four percent over three years. The hospital has offered to remove the gag clause if the rest of the contract is accepted. On Tuesday, the striking nurses got support from firefighter, police officers, and Congressman Bob Brady.

By Doug Cunningham

The Massey Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia where at least 25 miners died in an explosion Monday had more than 3,000 safety violation citations – 638 since 2009. Ellen Smith edits Mine Safety and Health News. She says enforcement by the Mine Safety and Health Administration has improved, but coal companies can still contest every violation. The Massey mine is non-union. Smith says union mines tend to be safer and union miners are much more willing to speak out about safety violations.

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On March 5, Irene Gonzalez, a Los Angeles juvenile probation officer and AFSCME Local 685 member, set out with a diverse group of other union members for 250-mile, 48-day March for California’s Future.

Sponsored by the California Federation of Teachers (CFT), AFSCME and a coalition of labor, education and faith groups, the march is drawing attention to the state’s budget crisis and the devastating impact of budget cuts on Californians now and into the future.

Last week, Gonzalez writes on the California Progress Report, that as the march entered Fresno

we came upon a 10-block long area of homeless people sleeping in the middle of the sidewalk flanked by rows and rows of tents, their only possessions being their sleeping bags and the clothes on their backs.

They are surrounded on all sides by boarded up homes. The empty, unoccupied houses, the foreclosed properties that many of these men and women once occupied, look down on them daily and seem to taunt them.

They have nowhere to go; no jobs, no prospects, and apparently no help of any kind. Where are the public services that could give these men and women a fresh start and a helping hand? The retraining and rehab centers? The medical clinics? The supportive services?

Click here to read her entire report.

Seven marchers, including five current or retired CFT members, are making the entire march. Along the way, hundreds of firefighters, nurses, in-home care workers, students and police officers have joined and will join the marchers for parts of their 250-mile trek to the state capitol in Sacramento.

Many are filing reports on the march’s website. Jenn Laskin, a Watsonville teacher and one of the core seven writes:

For me, one of the beautiful aspects of this march is the collaboration between labor groups, community groups and individuals, religious institutions and pets — literally…we have been visited by many dogs on the march. While our philosophies and tactics may be challenging at times, we all want the same thing: basic needs to be met for everyone, a fair and just distribution of wealth and an end to budget gridlock and non-human priorities in Sacramento

In Merced, Jim Miller, a teacher from San Diego, along with some Los Angeles City College students who were spending part of their spring break on the march, spoke to a group of students at Merced College about why they were on the road for economic justice.

I told them that we were choosing what kind of future would be out there for their children. I told them that it was time to choose between prisons and schools, time to raise revenue rather than fire teachers, raise fees, and shut the doors to opportunity in California.

Then the students and I told them that we came to the Central Valley to start a discussion with our forgotten neighbors, those people the big cities on the coast tend to ignore or disdain. Afterwards they thanked us for coming to Merced, for thinking of coming to the valley in the first place, for marching for them.

Click here to read all the updates.

Says CFT President Mary Hittelman:

Democracy is no longer in charge of Sacramento; instead, ideology is in control, benefiting the richest and most powerful while dismantling the California Dream for the rest of us.

We don’t have to let California go down that drain. March with us to restore the promise of the golden state.

The march ends April 21 with a huge rally at the state capitol in Sacramento.

Erin Radford, program officer at the Solidarity Center, sends us this request for action to support Iraqi union leaders in their struggle for bargaining and other workplace rights.

Iraqi workers across the country have faced harassment, threats and even criminal charges for forming unions despite their hopes for democracy. But Iraq’s unions are fighting back—and they need your support.

Iraq’s 1987 labor law abolished the right to collectively bargain, the right to strike and the minimum wage. It reclassified all public-sector workers (approximately 90 percent of the workforce) as “civil service” and prohibited them from forming unions. The Iraqi government has chosen to enforce this outdated law, refusing to negotiate with unions and declaring them “illegal.”

You can take action by signing the International Call for a Fair and Just Labor Law. Or write to the Iraqi Embassy. Click here to find contact information. There’s a great interview here with Hashmeya Musshin al-Saadawi, president of the Electicity Workers and Employees Union in Basra about the labor campaign.

Without the protection of a labor law in line with international labor standards, Iraqi workers and their unions are regularly subjected to exploitation and violations of their internationally recognized workers’ rights. In response, workers and unions from across the country—from Basra to Iraqi Kurdistan—have come together in protest. The Iraqi Labor Campaign, launched in November 2009 with support from the International Trade Union Confederation, is demanding the government put in place a fair and just labor law that guarantees Iraqi workers and unions their fundamental rights at work and allows the formation of free and independent trade unions. The campaign is also a pioneering effort to bridge religious, political, ethnic and geographic divides in the face of often tremendous personal risk.

Already, the campaign has achieved significant success. Some 85 members of Parliament have signed the campaign appeal, along with leaders of community organizations, businesses and political leaders. The key parliamentary drafting committee has consulted with the campaign’s coordinating group, and Members of Parliament are petitioning for the legislation to be debated in Parliament.

The AFL-CIO has long supported Iraqi workers in their fight for basic workers’ rights and democracy at work. Last fall, the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center brought leaders from five Iraqi unions to Washington, D.C., to highlight their struggle with AFL-CIO leaders and U.S. government policymakers. The Iraqis also attended the AFL-CIO Convention in Pittsburgh, where the AFL-CIO passed its most recent resolutions on Iraq. The AFL-CIO strongly supports the Iraqi labor movement’s latest push for worker rights through this campaign.

But as recently as April 2, the Iraqi government ordered the immediate transfer of four prominent leaders—including the president and vice-president—of Iraq’s Basra-based Refinery Workers Union out of their jobs. The transfer appears to have been issued as punishment of these union organizers. It came on the heels of weeks of negotiations and disputes between the union and refinery management.

“Punishing workers for organizing and holding peaceful demonstrations to advocate for their interests is an unfortunately common practice in Iraq,” noted Solidarity Center Interim Executive Director Nancy Mills.

Iraq needs to immediately replace the outdated anti-union labor laws that bar union organizing and collective bargaining with new laws which recognize the fundamental democratic rights of workers, once and for all.

Learn more about the situation of workers in Iraq.

The Massey Energy Co. mine, where 25 coal miners were killed and four remain unaccounted following an explosion yesterday, was assessed nearly $1 million in fines for safety violations last year, including violations concerning escape routes and ventilation, according to federal records and news reports.

The mine is owned by Massey and operated by its subsidiary, Performance Coal Co.

Early indications indicate the blast was caused by highly explosive methane gas leaking from sealed-off areas of the Upper Big Branch Mine in Raleigh County, W.Va.—the same cause of the 2006 Sago Mine disaster that killed 12 miners. New federal mine safety rules enacted after the Sago disaster included tougher new requirements for sealing off worked-out areas.

CNN reports that in 2009, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) proposed nearly $1 million in fines for more than 450 safety violations at the nonunion Upper Big Branch Mine, including penalties for

more than 50 “unwarrantable failure” violations, which are among the most serious findings an inspector can issue. Among those were citations for escape routes for miners and air quality ventilation.

According to ABC News, Massey was fighting the MSHA fines, including those for

57 infractions just last month for violations that included repeatedly failing to develop and follow the ventilation plan. The federal records catalog the problems at the Upper Big Branch Mine….They show the company was fighting many of the steepest fines, or simply refusing to pay them.

MSHA records also show that in at least six of the past 10 years, the Massey mine’s injury rate has been worse than the national average for similar operations.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, a former Mine Workers (UMWA) president and third generation coal miner, says, “The thoughts and prayers of America’s workers are with the families” of those killed and for the safety of the “courageous” rescue teams. He adds:

However, this incident isn’t just a matter of happenstance, but rather the inevitable result of a profit-driven system and reckless corporate conduct. Many mining companies have given too little attention to safety over the years and too much to the bottom line.

In 2006, a fire at Massey’s Aracoma Alma No. 1 Mine, also in West Virginia, killed two miners. Ultimately, Massey’s Aracoma Coal Co. subsidiary pleaded guilty to 10 criminal mine safety violations and paid $2.5 million in fines related to that fatal fire. According to ABC, the two miners “suffocated as they looked for a way to escape.”

Aracoma later admitted in a plea agreement that two permanent ventilation controls had been removed in 2005 and not replaced, according to published reports. The two widows of the miners killed in Aracoma were unsatisfied by the plea agreement, telling the judge they believed the company cared more about profits then safety.

Tony Oppegard, a lawyer and mine safety advocate from Kentucky, told The New York Times, “Massey’s commitment to safety has long been questioned in the coalfields.” The Times notes a 2006 internal memo from Massey CEO Donald Blankenship.

In the memo, Mr. Blankenship instructed the company’s underground mine superintendents to place coal production first.

“This memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that the coal pays the bills,” he wrote.

Last night, Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.), whose district includes the Upper Big Branch Mine, told reporters:

This is the second major disaster at a Massey site in recent years, and something needs to be done.

Meanwhile, the Charleston Gazette reports safety officials are looking at methane that built up inside a sealed-off area or leaked through the seals as the cause of the blast. In 2006, methane from sealed-off areas caused the explosions at a Sago, W.Va., mine that killed 12 miners and also at the Darby Mine in Kentucky where two coal miners were killed.

The new mine safety rules passed after the Sago and Darby disasters called for increased monitoring of air quality in active and sealed sections of the mines to avoid methane build up. The new regulations also required mine operators to install stronger barriers between active and nonactive sections of mines.

But, as Oppegard told the Gazette, “Seals can be deadly if they are not maintained and monitored properly.”

In a statement today on the explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch Mine, Rahall says:

We will scrutinize the health and safety violations at this mine to see whether the law was circumvented and miner’s precious lives were willfully put at risk, and there will be accountability.

After an explosion at a Tesoro refinery in Anacortes, Wash., killed five United Steelworkers (USW) members and severely injured two other workers, the petroleum industry claimed its safety record is exemplary. Says USW President Leo W. Gerard:

It’s incredible this industry brags about its safety record just after five people were killed in a refinery explosion.

After the April 2 explosion, officials of the American Petroleum Institute told reporters that the industry was not getting enough credit for its health and safety record, citing drops in injury and illnesses rates during the past several years.

Also, says the USW, National Petrochemical & Refiners Association officials bragged that the industry has a lower injury rate than the U.S. manufacturing sector as a whole.  Says Gerard:

The problem is the injury and illness rates the trade associations cite are misleading and do not give the full picture of health and safety within the refining sector. The recordable injury rates that [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] OSHA collects measure items like slips, falls, sprains and fractures, not poor safety practices that lead to incidents like explosions and fires. There’s a difference between a sprained ankle and an explosion that kills five people.

The USW members killed were Matthew C. Bowen, 31; Darrin J. Hoines, 43; Daniel J. Aldridge, 50;  Kathryn Powell, 29, and Donna Van Dreumel, 36. Two others are still hospitalized with severe burns. They are USW member Matt Gumbel, 34 and Lew Janz, 41, a supervisor and longtime USW member.

According to the USW, Tesoro has a history of serious health and safety violations. The Associated Press reports that Washington Department of Labor and Industries

Fined the company $85,700 last April for 17 serious safety and health violations, defined as those with potential to cause death or serious physical injury. The fine was lowered in a settlement with the company, which required Tesoro to correct hazards and hire a third-party consultant to do a safety audit.

Also, inspectors found 150 instances of deficiencies and said the company did not ensure safe work practices and failed to update safety information when changes were made to equipment.

USW Vice President Gary Beevers, who oversees the union’s oil sector says “it is obvious that this industry still has not learned from other refinery disasters and near-misses.”

They are more concerned with their image than taking appropriate action on safety…There have been too many accidents and near-miss incidents in the oil refining industry. In honor of our brothers and sisters who were killed and seriously injured at the Tesoro refinery we urge the industry to take steps to ensure an incident of this type never happens again.

For more on refinery safety, visit the USW’s Oil Bargaining Campaign website.

By Doug Cunningham

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