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News Briefs

Date Posted: October 1 2004

ABC's money, time flow to Bush
WASHINGTON (PAI) - It's said that a man is known by the company he keeps.

A recent news release by the anti-union Associated Builders and Contractors said that this fall, the ABC plans to spend $1.7 million this fall on the election, and distribute a million voter guides openly backing President Bush.

Electing Bush "is ABC's number one goal," said ABC National Chair Carole Bionda.

The ABC is also involved in:

  • Production of one million voter guides in English and Spanish. ABC wants to distribute 600,000 of them in battleground states. It claims the guides "will compare and contrast the records of presidential candidates."
  • Deployment of a nationwide team of company coordinators to distribute the
    guides, encourage voter registration and electoral participation among ABC
    member firm employees.
  • Production and mailing of two advocacy pieces about Democratic nominee
    John F. Kerry's record on construction issues. The "advocacy pieces" will stress the senator's stands against what ABC calls "merit shops" - anti-union construction companies.

WTC cleanup workers start to sue
NEW YORK (PAI)--Three years after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks
destroyed the World Trade Center, more than 800 workers who cleaned up the
debris are sick - and suing.

In a class action suit filed Sept. 10 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan,
the workers said the owner of the WTC and the four contractors who
supervised the cleanup at "Ground Zero" knew the workers were exposed to
hazards - and didn't protect them.

Those 800 workers may be just the tip of an iceberg of workers - many of
them union construction workers - exposed to asbestos, toxic fumes, poisonous combinations
of gases and hazardous liquids in either the cleanup of "The Pile" or in disposing of the WTC debris at a landfill on Staten Island.

A recent federal report calculated that 40,000 workers toiled at the two sites, and that 250,000-400,000 lower Manhattan residents were exposed to the danger. It added that many ailments from that exposure will not appear for years.

There is no victims compensation fund for the building trades workers and others in the
cleanup. There is a fund for families of WTC victims, but it's not open for claims any more - and it restricted who was eligible.

The suit cites a federal Government Accountability Office report released the week before and other evidence. That study says "screenings among other responders--carpenters, cleanup workers, heavy equipment operators, iron workers, mechanics, telecom technicians and truck drivers--have found respiratory health effects similar to those seen in FDNY Fire Fighters."

Besides the families of firefighters and unionized police who lost loved ones in the terrorist attacks, the victims' fund was open "only to those rescue workers who were injured in the first 12 hours "working at "Ground Zero" and to those "non-rescue workers injured in the first 96 hours," court papers say.

That means the other workers who are now suing - who became ill later - were left out in the cold, their lawyers say.

"The tragic reality is that so many of the brave heroes who worked so tirelessly and unselfishly" at 'the Pile' are now "becoming a second wave of casualties of this horrific attack," said their attorney, David Worby.