The mine manager and other senior staff at the Crandall Canyon coal mine in Utah hid information from federal mining officials that could have prevented the disaster and should face criminal charges, a congressional committee said today. Last August, six miners and three rescue workers died after the mine collapsed.

In a report released today, the House Education and Labor Committee says the mining company’s plan to remove coal was flawed and should never have been submitted, and that the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) should never have approved it.

The committee referred its findings to the U.S. Department of Justice for possible criminal prosecutions. Click here to read a summary of the report by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the committee chairman.

(04/28/08) Six more members of the U.S. House of Representatives have become co-sponsors of the Mail Network Protection Act (H.R. 4236) in support of the union's efforts to reduce wasteful, inefficient, and detrimental subcontracting by requiring the U.S. Postal Service. The legislation would help preserve inexpensive, trustworthy mail service for the American public as well as USPS jobs by requiring the USPS to bargain with postal unions before it engages in significant contracting-out.

Sen. John McCain is used to getting softball questions from his fans in the media. At his town hall meeting yesterday in Michigan, however, he finally took a tough, smart question from an unexpected source.

When a 14-year-old girl attending the meeting got to ask a question of a presidential candidate, she took the opportunity to ask why he skipped out on voting on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

McCain said he agreed with the minority of senators who filibustered the bill, which would give targets of workplace discrimination the chance to fight for equal pay. He claimed it wouldn’t help women. Here’s what he had to say:

I don't believe that this would do anything to help the rights of women, except maybe help trial lawyers and others in that profession.

      A few items have been piling up in my inbox that need to be shared. Workers who pick tomatoes have been seeking a penny a pound increase in wages to help address their egregiously low wages. Yum! Brands, which owns Taco Bell and other chains, has agreed to do so. But Burger King Corp. refuses. Now, it turns out Burger King hired a private security firm to spy on the Student/Farmworker Alliance, one of several groups seeking to improve the lives of migrants in Florida. At a recent Senate hearing, witnesses described how the workers sometimes are held against their will, beaten and forced to work for little or no pay—21st century slavery. (Click here to sign the petition to eliminate modern-day servitude in America’s produce fields.) If Burger King thinks slave-like working conditions are OK, guess spying is, too.

With the busy summer travel season fast approaching, the nation’s air traffic controllers are alerting the public that a combination of short-staffing, fatigue and faulty equipment in control towers is a "recipe for disaster."

Just this week, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) issued warnings about several near misses at two of the country’s major airports—Atlanta and Cincinnati. In Atlanta, the world’s busiest airport, the number of incidents when planes have gotten too close has already exceeded last year’s total—and the situation is getting worse. In Cincinnati, three such serious incidents have occurred in the past six weeks.

Jeremy Bishop, executive director of Pride At Work, describes how we can assist laid-off flight attendants at Aloha and ATA airlines.

Recently, thousands of flight attendants at Aloha Airlines and ATA Airlines have been laid off after their respective companies went out of business. As any working person can attest, this is a terrible time to be unemployed.

Once covered by contracts negotiated by the Flight Attendants-CWA, these flight attendants were forced to leave stable wages, health care benefits and a path to retirement behind for the unemployment line.

If you are a working woman, are you worried about finding a job that pays your bills and provides benefits? Or concerned about the rising cost of health care? Maybe you're frustrated you can't find time to do your job and spend time with your family. Or are you tired of working as hard as your male counterparts and not getting paid as much?

The AFL-CIO and Working America’s just-launched online 2008 Ask a Working Woman survey enables you to share workplace concerns about issues such as equal pay and stronger family and medical leave laws. Click here to take the survey and here to share it with other working women.

The recent headlines about an FBI raid on the U.S. Office of the Special Counsel (OSC) finally validates the yearlong campaign by Pride At Work (P@W) to highlight the alleged mismanagement of the office that was created to enforce the civil rights rule and protect whistle-blowers in the federal workforce.

In March 2007, the AFL-CIO constituency group created a special campaign, “Blow the whistle on Bloch” aimed at letting the public know how agency chief Scott Bloch had weakened the office’s mission. Instead of protecting workers’ rights, the office had become a launching pad for partisan attacks on civil and workers' rights, says P@W Executive Director Jeremy Bishop.

Brent Gillette, Labor 2008 director for Michigan, sends us a report on Sen. John McCain’s visit to Michigan.

When Sen. John McCain visited Rochester, Mich., this morning, he was met by a contingent of union members asking him for solutions to the crisis facing the economy.

Some 28 union members gathered in front of the hall where McCain was set to speak and distributed fliers on McCain’s anti-worker record on trade, health care and jobs.

Mark Gaffney, president of the Michigan State AFL-CIO, says McCain’s votes on trade and the economy are proof that he’s out of touch with working families.

John McCain will not likely have a government and an administration that does enough or cares enough about creating good-paying manufacturing jobs here in America.

The failure to enforce even weak U.S. labor laws has created an incentive for many employers to hire undocumented immigrant workers, several experts told a House committee earlier this week.

Bill Beardell, director of the non-partisan Equal Justice Center, told the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee some unscrupulous employers actually prefer to hire undocumented workers. In the absence of effective federal enforcement of worker protections, they know they can easily exploit and silence such workers, he says. During the hearing, Beardell played a chilling audiotape of an employer’s phone message to an immigrant worker who simply wanted to be paid for the work he had done. (See video.)

During the hearing, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), committee chairman, said that with more than 7.6 million unemployed workers in this country, some employers insist they cannot find workers to fill unskilled jobs. Miller makes it clear that Congress needs to enact stronger labor protections to protect the rights of guest workers and U.S. workers. (See video.)

Yesterday, Sen. John McCain gave a speech about his vision for the U.S. Supreme Court and the kind of nominees he’d choose if elected.

McCain said that when it comes to looking for a Supreme Court justice, extremist conservatives John Roberts and Samuel Alito meet his standards “in every way” and “would serve as the model” for his nominees if he were elected president.

When you look at the record, though, Roberts and Alito have failed to look out for the rights of workers. Check out some of the cases where Roberts and Alito have provided decisive votes:

• Alito was the author of the May 2007 opinion that ruled against Lilly Ledbetter’s right to challenge the pay discrimination she faced on the job. Roberts joined that opinion, which fundamentally changed the way workers could fight discrimination at work.

(05/07/08) For the first time, APWU locals and state organizations will register delegates to the APWU National Convention online, through the union's Web site. "This is another important step on the road to modernization," said APWU Secretary-Treasurer Terry R. Stapleton. "Submitting paper credentials is a thing of the past."

In the aftermath of the cyclone, Burmese residents seek fresh water.

With more than 22,000 people reported dead and as many as 1 million homeless after a tropical cyclone that struck Burma over the weekend, the Federation of Trade Unions of Burma (FTUB) has issued an urgent plea to the global union movement for aid in launching rescue, relief and rehabilitation work for victims of the storm.

The cyclone was the worst to hit Asia in almost 20 years, according to weather experts.

FTUB, a partner of the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, plans to use relief fund contributions to distribute clothing, medicine, and non-perishable food for displaced workers and their families, build temporary shelters and assist in providing needed counseling and health clinics. Click here to contribute to help Burmese workers.

Tobacco farm workers, joined by supporters, rallied in North Carolina last year for justice on the job.

Hundreds of members of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), religious leaders and community and union supporters from across the nation traveled to Winston-Salem, N.C., where they rallied today outside the Reynolds American Inc. (RAI) shareholders’ meeting.

Carrying displays of mock tobacco leaves and placards depicting life in the tobacco fields, the marchers demanded that RAI CEO Susan Ivey meet with workers to discuss the unsafe and harsh work conditions, something Ivey has refused to do for more than a year. Reynolds American is the parent of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.

For the past seven years, Bush administration appointees have carried out a war on workers, pursuing a corporate agenda that favored the wealthy over working people.

Some of the most egregious actions came from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which is supposed to protect workers’ freedom to join unions and bargain for a better life. But the Republican-dominated NLRB in recent years took away the rights of millions of workers to be represented by unions, made it harder to form unions through majority sign-up, limited the ability of illegally fired workers to recover back pay and allowed employers to discriminate against union supporters in the hiring process.

Somewhere along the road from the 2000 presidential campaign to this year's elections, Sen. John McCain transformed from a lawmaker willing to challenge extremist Republicans like George W. Bush to just another politician begging to kiss the ring of the Great Leader and win Bush's blessing as inheritor of the White House mantle.

This description of the McCain metamorphosis is not idle speculation from afar. It's based on the personal experience of political analyst Arianna Huffington, who supported McCain a few years ago to the point of throwing a fundraiser for him. Now, she devotes a large section of her new book to show how McCain has abandoned any modicum of moderation and has fully embraced the extremist agenda of Bush and his clones.

Here’s one more reason that the Bush administration’s refusal to push China to respect workers’ rights is wrong. This week, Chinese police rescued 167 village children sold to work as slave laborers in a city in the booming southern province of Guangdong in the Pearl River Delta. The children all came from poor families who lived more than 600 miles away.

The Guardian newspaper in London credits Southern Metropolis Daily, an underground Chinese newspaper, for revealing that more than 1,000 children, some as young as 7, had been sold "like cabbages" at a street market in southwestern China. Many had fake papers certifying they were adults, and more had documents saying they were in their early teens.

Chinese officials also said they were investigating reports that hundreds of other rural children had been lured or forced into captive, slave-like conditions for minimal pay.

(05/05/08) The Postal Service has informed the APWU that postal records will be updated May 16, 2008, to reflect the Feb. 16 pay upgrade of all APWU-represented employees, APWU President William Burrus reported in an update for union members. The 2006-2010 Collective Bargaining Agreement included provisions for a one-level upgrade for all APWU-represented employees, effective Feb. 16. Although employees' wages were increased on schedule, changes to Forms 50 and other postal records were not implemented in a timely fashion.

The mortgage foreclosure crisis, fueled by years of unchecked predatory lending practices and a speculative bubble in real estate prices, has resulted in a disaster for millions of America’s homeowners. Not since the Depression of the 1930s have so many U.S. homeowners owed more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.

Defaulting on the Dream, a new report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, projects that one in 33 current U.S. homeowners may be headed toward foreclosure in the coming years because of subprime loans. But the crisis affects not just homeowners. Communities suffer as families move out, decreasing the tax base that funds vital local services.

(05/05/08) A federal appeals court has upheld an unfair labor practice charge against the Postal Service in a case involving a supervisor who threatened to retaliate against an employee who had filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit rejected USPS claims that the supervisor was exercising his rights under the First Amendment when he threatened to sue the employee and warned the worker that he "had better get a good attorney."