Labor Union Blog

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Workers Independent News Labor Radio
Internet Radio Program 04/21/10
Producers: Doug Cunningham & Jesse Russell

Labor Radio Rundown:

1) WIN Newscast

2) In Washington, D.C. construction trade unions held their national legislative conference this week. It was all about jobs, keeping economic stimulus money flowing and getting some financial regulations on Wall Street that will help spur jobs growth.

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The Coalition of Immokalee Workers continues to raise the quality of life for tomato pickers in Florida. Jesse Russell reports:

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By Doug Cunningham

The United Steel Workers union is urging the oil industry to monitor safety conditions at refinery construction sites in the wake of another death in the industry this week. A contractor was killed in a crane accident while working on the Motiva Enterprises expansion project in Port Arthur, Texas.

OSHA is investigating the cause. The USW expressed condolences to the family of the victim. The union says there had been several minor crane accidents at the site before the fatal one.

By Doug Cunningham

United Educators of San Francisco President Dennis Kelly says the school district there is declaring an impasse in contract talks with the jobs of 811 teachers on the line. San Francisco’s school district is facing a $113 million budget deficit. The school district could ultimately try to impose its terms on the teacher’s union.

[Kelly]: “If the district chooses to impose, then our traditional response is going to strike.”

And Kelly says if that happens…

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President Obama will travel to Beckley, W.Va., Sunday, April 25, to attend a special memorial service for the 29 coal miners killed in the April 5 explosion at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama–who will be accompanied by Vice President Joe Biden–will deliver a eulogy “honoring the lives of those who perished and offering his deepest condolences to the loved ones they left behind.”

Meanwhile, labor radio journalist Rick Smith interviewed AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and asked him if the Upper Big Branch disaster was the result of a “failure of regulation” or of “government failing to keep mines safe.” Trumka said we should look elsewhere.

In this specific instance, knowing this operator, Don Blankenship from Massey Energy, it is a failure to comply with the law. A lot of people join in that failure. You have federal inspectors who are trying to do a good job, but they’ve been hampered for the past eight years by the Bush administration. They had a program where they thought they would cooperate for enforcement as opposed to enforcing the law. So the law went unenforced.

Trumka also noted that mines with good safety and health records are the most productive, especially over the life time of mine. But when a mine is unsafe,

when they start cutting corners, when they leave large accumulations of lose coal and coal dust, when they don’t take care of ventilation, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

Trumka, the former president of the Mine Workers (UMWA), also told Smith one of the advantages of union representation in the mine is the contractual ability to shut down a mine or portion mine for unsafe working conditions. But Upper Big Branch was a non-union mine where

the workers were intimidated–and whenever you’re dealing with a bad economic environment like you are, the intimidation is easier to impose on workers. Don Blankenship is a master at intimidating people…I think if everybody had the right to collective bargaining, all worksites would be a lot safer and a lot healthy for our workers.

Click here for more of the interview.

Also last week, Marlene Griffith, whose husband, William Griffith, died in the explosion,  filed a wrongful-death suit against Massey Energy, saying the mine’s history of safety violations amounted to negligence.

That didn’t sit well with Nathan Coffey, Public Affairs Coordinator for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the conservative front group that pushes corporate friendly legislation at the state level. He sent out a tweet that reflects how at least some people near the top of the corporate food chain think. (Thanks to the folks at Think Progress for passing this along.) Here’s Coffey:

Everyone wants free money! Widow of miner killed in explosion in WV sues owner Massey Energy for negligence.

Coffey, later apologized for his comments saying he admitted “I was wrong. It was distasteful & a baseless sarcastic comment.”

He’ll get no argument here. But saying he’s sorry doesn’t earn him a free pass either.

California’s nurse-to-patient staffing law reduces patient deaths, allows nurses to spend more time with each patient and helps keep experienced nurses on the job, a new study by University of Pennsylvania researchers documents.

The study shows that if other states followed the California ratios, patients’ lives also would be saved, too. Says Malinda Markowitz, RN, and co-president of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses United (CNA/NNU), the study shows what “California RNs have long known—safe staffing saves lives.”

We see the effects every day at the bedside in improved patient care, an enhanced quality of life for patients and nurses able to more safely practice the profession to which we have dedicated our lives.

The California staffing law was implemented in 2004 following a long fight led by the CNA/NNU. The first-in-the-nation law established a minimum nurse-to-patient ratio of one to five. Before the law was implemented it was not uncommon to find a single nurse in charge of eight, 10, 12 or more patients on a shift.

The study, “Implications of the California Nurse Staffing Mandates for Other States,” was published in the policy journal, Health Services Research. It was conducted by University of Pennsylvania researchers led by Linda Aiken, RN, Ph.D., director of the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.

The study surveyed more than 22,000 RNs in California, New Jersey and Pennsylvania and its findings include:

• New Jersey hospitals would have 14 percent fewer patient deaths and Pennsylvania 11 percent fewer deaths if they matched California’s 1:5 ratios in surgical units.
• California RNs have far more time to spend with patients and more of their hospitals have enough RNs on staff to provide quality patient care.
• Fewer California RNs miss changes in patient conditions because of their workload than New Jersey or Pennsylvania RNs.
• In California hospitals with better compliance with the ratios, RNs cite fewer complaints from patients and families and the nurses have more confidence that patients can manage their own care after discharge.
• California RNs are far more likely to stay at the bedside, and less likely to report burnout than nurses in New Jersey or Pennsylvania.

Aiken, the report’s main author, says if New Jersey and Pennsylvania hospitals had been operating under the California ratio law, 468 lives

might have been saved over the two-year period just among general surgery patients….Because all hospitalized patients are likely to benefit from improved nurse staffing, not just general surgery patients, the potential number of lives that could be saved by improving nurse staffing in hospitals nationally is likely to be many thousands a year.

Markowitz says nurses in several states and in Congress are fighting to win safe staffing ratio legislation. In the U.S. Senate, S. 1031, the National Nursing Shortage Reform and Patient Advocacy Act, is modeled after the successful California law.

Today’s the day when women workers finally catch up with the pay men received last year—the day we mark as Equal Pay Day. Being three months and 20 days behind men’s wages means women who work full-time still are paid, on average, 78 cents for every dollar men are paid. According to the most recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median wages of full-time, year-round workers in 2008 stood at $35,745 for women and $46,367 for men.

The wage gap is even worse for women of color. In 2008, the earnings for African American women were $31,489, 67.9 percent of men’s earnings (a drop from 68.7 percent in 2007), and Latinas’ earnings were $26,846, 58 percent of men’s earnings (a drop from 59 percent in 2007).

The chart here shows the molasses-like movement in closing the wage gap. One way to speed up the progress is to urge lawmakers to support the Paycheck Fairness Act, which was passed by the U.S. House in 2009. It updates the Equal Pay Act by giving employees the tools they need to close the wage gap and providing the government with enforcement power to correct pay inequities. Momsrising has an action here to urge your senator to close the wage gap and back the Paycheck Fairness Act.

The group notes that given equal résumés and job experiences, mothers are offered $11,000 lower starting salaries than non-mothers. Yet fathers are offered higher starting salaries than non-fathers. More than half of women bring home at least half the family’s earnings—which means entire families suffer when women are paid less.

The average woman loses $700,000 in pay due to gender discrimination in her lifetime.

Kudos to President Obama who has established the White House Council on Women and Girls. The high-level body, made up of Cabinet members and heads of sub-Cabinet agencies, is charged with advancing the rights and needs of women, including equal pay. Declaring today National Equal Pay Day, Obama notes that “government can only advance this issue so far.”

The collective action of businesses, community organizations, and individuals is necessary to ensure that every woman receives just treatment and compensation….I call upon American men and women, and all employers, to acknowledge the injustice of wage discrimination and to commit themselves to equal pay for equal work.

And kudos to Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who changed his Twitter icon to reflect Equal Pay Day.

Sen. Tom Harkin, who has sponsored the Fair Pay Act, and Lily Ledbetter, whose landmark U.S. Supreme Court case re-ignited the issue of equal pay, put the issue of wage discrimination in the broader context:

[W]e must recognize that the problem of unequal pay goes beyond insidious discrimination. As a nation, we unjustly devalue jobs traditionally performed by women, even when they require comparable skills to jobs traditionally performed by men. Why is a housekeeper worth less than a janitor? Why is a parking meter reader worth less than an electrical meter reader?

The Fair Pay Act would ensure that employers provide equal pay for jobs that are equivalent in skill, effort, responsibility and working conditions.

Civil rights pioneer Dorothy Height, who died today, early on championed the notion that the rights of women are fundamentally connected to issues of fairness for all Americans. As the New York Times put it:

Ms. Height is widely credited as the first person in the modern civil rights era to treat the problems of equality for women and equality for African Americans as a seamless whole, merging concerns that had historically been largely separate.

Height “embodied struggle, strength, determination, love and elegance,” says AFL-CIO Vice President Arlene Holt Baker, and her passing today is a reminder of how an injustice to one is an injustice to all.

Pointing to an unemployment rate—nearly 25 percent—for construction workers that is “unacceptably high,” Vice President Joe Biden yesterday told some 3,000 delegates to the AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD) legislative conference:

We are waging a way to get you back where you belong, not just for your sake but for the sake of the middle class, because if you do not grow, the middle class will not grow, and without a growing middle class our ability to lead to the 21st century is diminished.

BCTD President Mark Ayers opened the three-day Washington, D.C., conference for union activists and leaders saying, “Putting our members back to work is our number one priority.” He also slammed

the poisonous and reprehensible behaviors of Wall Street and eight years of an administration that had hopes of eradicating unions. Together they have torn a gaping hole in the financial fabric of our nation and our very existence as the stalwarts of the middle class.

He said while there are signs of economic improvement, recovery “will be neither painless nor short term,” and pointed to several issues on Capitol Hill that could boost the economy and construction jobs, but are stalled by the Republican “just say ‘No’” strategy.

For example, a balanced energy and climate bill that will generate tens of thousands of construction jobs for our members now and in the future has languished in the United States Senate.

Our unions are also working hard on several smaller—but vitally important—jobs bills, including legislation that contains extensions of our members’ benefits under COBRA, providing longer unemployment insurance coverage and helping spur highway and bridge projects.

Ayers also called for passage of tough financial reform legislation that he says will reopen the spigot of private investment and credit that was turned off during the fiscal crisis and stalled or killed tens of thousands of construction projects.

We must get those projects rolling again and financial reform legislation will help provide the structure and the certainty that is necessary to attract new private investments in all types of projects.

Delegates head to Capitol Hill today to lobby lawmakers, and tomorrow, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka will address the conference. Click here for Ayers’ full remarks and here for a video report on Monday’s action.