Solidarity march set for Oct. 18
Building trades union members and their families are invited to a "solidarity march" to protest anti-worker National Labor Relations Board rulings, and to support the Employee Free Choice Act.

The event will take place in Detroit on Saturday, Oct. 18. Staging will take place at 8 a.m., the march will start at 9 a.m. Participants will gather at the IBEW Local 58 union hall, 1358 Abbott Street, Detroit, 48226. The march will proceed along Michigan Avenue to the McNamara Federal Building, which houses National Labor Relations Board offices.

"Workers have the blues. Let's show the United States just how blue we are in Michigan," reads a "Justice For Workers Now" flyer promoting the event. (www.justiceforworkersnow.com)

The NLRB - with a majority of board members appointed by President Bush - has earned widespread derision from the labor movement for its inexorable succession of anti-union and anti-worker rulings.

And the Employee Free Choice Act is seen as the single most important legislation affecting organized labor since the Republican Congress adopted the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act over the veto of President Truman in 1947. The EFCA would simplify union organizing by allowing simple "card check" voting among employees, rather than the use of a formal ballot elections. Labor unions argue that employers are free to coerce and threaten employees to vote against union organizing before the elections are held.


Falls are still prime source of fatals
The biggest payoff for focused safety training would be in the area of fall protection - a new study found that more than a fifth of all U.S. construction worker fatalities is related to falls.

The information was released in July as part of a study by the University of Tennessee's Construction Industry Research and Policy Center. The researchers, using information compiled by OSHA, looked at 800 construction fatalities in 2006 and found that 21.8 percent of workers died from falls.

It's a new study, but it confirms historic data: the overall rankings in the causes of construction worker deaths in 2006 "is very similar to the rank pattern in 1991-2005," the report said, adding: "the individual ranks of the causes vary very little from year-to-year."

Following falls, leading causes of on-the-job death for construction workers includes "crushed/runover of non-operator of construction equipment (8.1 percent); electrocution (7.8 percent), and crushed/runover/trapped operator of construction equipment (7.3 percent).

Other findings in the report:

• In 51.4 percent of the fatal events the victim was judged to be "the primary initiator of the cause."
• The most construction fatalities took place on Wednesday (21.5 percent); followed by Tuesday (18.5 percent) then Thursday (17.3 percent). Excluding weekends, Friday had the fewest fatal days: 15.9 percent.
• Most fatal events happened between the hours of 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. (11.7 percent), but the hour-to-hour margins were fairly close.
• The numbers revealed the relatively high amount of danger on smaller construction projects. Nearly half - 48.2 percent - of U.S. construction worker fatalities occurred on jobs valued less than $250,000.