WIN Week In Review April 25-27, 2008

By Doug Cunningham

Hillary Clinton beat Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania Presidential Primary this week. She thanked unions for the win. Ted Kirsch is president of the Pennsylvania American Federation of Teachers, a union backing Clinton. He says blue collar workers gave Clinton this win.

[Kirsch]: "Well, the blue collar workers are the people of this country. They're not the money people. They're the people who are suffering from the Bush economy. And that's why the people who are hit hardest by the issues are voting for Hillary."

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Thousands of workers are still dying on the job each year in the U.S. and in some cases employers are paying as little as $750 in each death. The AFL-CIO’s annual report on death and injuries on the job says in 2006, the latest year for which numbers are available, more than 5800 workers were killed on the job. There’s an increase in the number of Latino workers being killed at work. The AFL-CIO says inspections and enforcement of workplace safety rules has seriously diminished under the Bush administration.

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As UAW workers fight for their livelihoods in the American Axle strike, the company is threatening to close plants and move all the production to Mexico. GM is curtailing production at two more auto plants because it can’t get parts from American Axle. Roughly 48,000 GM workers have been affected by the strike, that's half their work force. American Axle is trying to slash wages in half and abolish future retiree pensions and health care benefits. UAW striker, Chris Workman says this is a fight for good American jobs.

[Workman]: "We are losing jobs at a fast rate and if we don't stop, this country is going to go into a recession, and a continued recession, because the jobs are not going to be here to keep buying the products anymore. NAFTA is killing this country."

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Disabled New York City Ironworker and 9/11 first responder John Sferazo was honored recently with a Troublemakers Award from the Detroit Labor Magazine Labor Notes. Sferazo says he speaks for the underdog and has been on a crusade to get adequate healthcare benefits for 9/11 workers exposed to toxins.

[Sferazo]: “There’s still twenty-something percent of the workers compensation cases being controverted, denied and delayed for almost seven years.”

Sferazo is pushing for legislation that would shift the economic burden of healthcare for workers responding to disasters from workers themselves onto the federal government instead.

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Robert Pearlman, CEO of the Diabetes Research Institute Foundation, says AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades unions provide millions of dollars in critical support for diabetes research.

[Pearlman]: "They've donated over $40 million through the years."

Pearlman recently met with union political lobbyists to try to deal with cuts in government funding for diabetes research.

[Pearlman]: "To see if we could help forestall the cuts of some of that funding."

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Life expectancy in the United States has dropped for women. For 12 percent of the women in the U.S., life expectancy is now shorter than in the 1980's, with the majority of the drop coming in the Deep South and the Lower Midwest. That drop is most prevalent in low-income and rural areas and the main culprits, suggested by the study, are poor diets, lack of exercise, and smoking.