Mining deaths fell to an all-time low last year, and two of the key reasons, says the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), are stronger enforcement of mine safety laws and the tougher mine safety rules passed in 2006 after a series of explosions, fires and other deadly incidents.

MSHA figures show 18 coal miners were killed on the job in 2009 and 16 workers in metal/nonmetal mines were killed—a drop from 2008’s total of 53 deaths. Says Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis:

No one should have to die for a job. Our nation’s miners, like all workers, deserve jobs that allow them to provide for themselves and their families. No job is truly good unless it is safe.

Joseph A. Main, assistant secretary of labor for mine safety and health, says while the number of mine deaths were at a record low, they still “represent a tragic loss to the families and friends of the 34 victims.”

He says a key factor contributing to the record low number of deaths include enforcement of the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act of 1977 and continued implementation of the MINER Act, enacted by Congress in 2006.

That’s quite a change from MSHA under the Bush administration. According to the Charleston Gazette, MSHA failed to issue more than 4,000 fines for recorded safety violations and Bush threatened to veto the MINER Act.

In 2009, MSHA assessed 173,000 civil penalties for violations of mine safety and health legal requirements. The dollar amount of assessed penalties totaled $140.7 million in 2009. Twenty-five flagrant violations were assessed at a total of $3.4 million.

Main emphasized that while the numbers indicate vast improvements in safety, much work remains to be done on the health side. Last month, MSHA launched a comprehensive program to end new cases of black lung among the nation’s coal miners. Black lung case are increasing and even younger miners are showing evidence of advanced and debilitating lung disease from excessive dust exposure.

Big shout out to AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Emerita Linda Chavez-Thompson who yesterday announced her candidacy for lieutenant governor of Texas, her home state.

The “Draft Linda” movement swept through Texas, pulling our much-admired former executive vice president out of semi-retirement and onto the Democratic Party slate for state leadership. The first hurdle is the March 2 primary, where she will run against Democratic candidates Ronnie Earle, a former county district attorney, and Austin delicatessen owner Marc Katz.

Ed Sills, communications director of the Texas AFL-CIO, says at her campaign launch, Chavez-Thompson’s campaign made it clear she is running to make changes in Texas, not against the Democratic opponents:

Chavez-Thompson discussed her journey from the cotton fields of West Texas to national office in the labor movement and how the hard work and leadership skills that drove her will translate to a state leadership role. She spoke of the need to emphasize education, health care and other basic priorities.

“With hard work and the right priorities, we can do better,” Chavez-Thompson said at Texas Democratic Party headquarters in Austin. “For the sake of our families and the future of this great state that we love so much, we must do better. When I am lieutenant governor, we will do better.”

Although Chavez-Thompson retired as the AFL-CIO’s first executive vice president in September 2007, she has continued to champion workers’ rights in her role as head of the Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers (ORIT), the International Trade Union Confederation’s (ITUC’s) regional organization for the Americas. She also will serve as an adviser to state federations and labor councils. Last year, she traveled to Colombia on a delegation that told Colombian President Alvaro Uribe the U.S. union movement cannot support the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement until real progress is made to protect the lives and rights of trade union members.

After the now infamous Christmas day “crotch bomber” episode on Northwest Airlines Flight 253, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) couldn’t keep his anti-union bile from bubbling out of his mouth.

DeMint, who has single-handedly bottled up the nomination of Erroll Southers to head the Transportation Security Agency (TSA), screeched that if TSA workers were allowed to unionize, terrorists clothed in plastic explosive-laden underwear or shoes or ball caps would begin blasting airplanes out of the sky on a regular basis.

BTW, the Obama administration supports the radical idea that TSA workers should be allowed to choose whether to join a union. Workers should have the choice, not officious senators.

Journalist Art Levine at Truthout talked with several security experts who blew DeMint’s twisted logic out of the water. And as Marshall McClain, who works a canine unit at LAX and is president of the Los Angeles Peace Officers Association, tells Levine:

My union card doesn’t sit between my bulletproof vest and my willingness to put my life on the line…His [DeMint's] claims about unionization and homeland security have no validity.

Read Art’s entire column here.

Check out Spencer Ackerman’s take on DeMint’s demented claims at The Washington Independent and Michael Whitney’s column on FireDogLake who calls DeMint’s claims “quite obviously, ludicrous.”

For more on TSA workers and unions, read our own James Parks’ coverage here and visit AFGE’s website for TSA workers here.

Contract negotiations are going way too slowly with United Airlines, so the Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA-CWA) today is holding informational pickets at 17 different airports around the globe to protest “the failure of United Airlines management to negotiate a new contract on time.” 

This from the Daily Labor Report (subscription required):

The AFA’s frustration with United has smoldered for five years, after flight attendants were forced to accept severe wage and benefit cuts as part of the carrier’s reorganization. United’s parent, UAL Corp., emerged from three years in bankruptcy with flight attendants providing $131 million in labor savings annually. Under the 2005 agreement, flight attendants’ hourly wages were trimmed 9.5 percent and their defined benefit pension plan was jettisoned to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. In the intervening years, flight attendants watched wave after wave of layoffs as United realigned operations in response to changing demand for air travel.

The AFA, which represents 15,000 United flight attendants, said in a statement:

Flight attendants are working at 1994 wage levels in the year 2010 and working 48 percent more compared with 2002 schedules and staffing. When United exited bankruptcy, CEO Glenn Tilton alone took a bonus that could have provided a 10 percent pay raise for all 15,000 flight attendants. AFA-CWA members are angry that management has not discussed the improvements envisioned, seeming only interested in delaying a new contract for flight attendants.

American Airlines Flight Attendants, represented by the Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA), are strongly supporting the United flight attendants. 

Says Laura Glading, APFA president:

We share many issues and concerns with our colleagues at United in our fight for a strong contract. This is not only about improving compensation and working conditions, but raising the living standard for Flights Attendants throughout the industry.

Working families, their unions and health care activists are continuing their battle to ensure that the final health care reform package being hammered out in negotiations between House and Senate leaders is real and meaningful reform. (Click here to find out more about the two bills and next week’s National Call-In Day for health care reform.)

The hot topic on the blogs and in the mainstream media is the fate of the tax on workers’ health benefits that is part of the Senate-passed bill.

Backers of the tax say it would impact only “Cadillac plans” but the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) calls that an “urban legend.” Says EPI economist Josh Bevins:

The excise tax proponents say their target is a Cadillac, but in reality they’re about as likely to hit a Chevy. The excise tax is not a progressive levy on lavish plans. Instead it’s a tax that will hit small businesses, older workers, and those most in need of health care the hardest.

In a conference call with reporters yesterday, Bevins, EPI President Larry Mishel and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich blew gaping holes in other arguments pro-tax advocates are spewing. Click here for more on the call from FireDogLake’s David Dayen,.

National Nurses United (NNU), the largest registered nurses union in the country, calls the tax scheme “unconscionable” and says working families “would have their health coverage taxed and seriously eroded,” if it is enacted. Read more here.

David Moberg at In These Times writes:

the excise tax on insurance—especially in contrast to surtax on the rich—proves to be just as bad as policy as it is politically. It’s intellectually bankrupt and widely despised.

Even as union members, health care groups and others are fighting to win real health care reform, on the other side, the private health insurance industry has not stopped trying to kill any meaningful reform. Seth Freedland at Inside Health Reform (subscription required) reports:

An in-house message sent by UnitedHealthcare to its employees used language that a consumer watchdog group calls “highly coercive” by urging workers to participate in a Web presentation by the insurer’s chief lobbyist as the company fights against major tenants of the health reform legislation moving in Congress.

Demanding that workers attend a meeting on company time that appears to be part of a larger imitative against some provisions of the health care system reform is nevertheless “political harassment,” Judy Dugan, research director for Consumer Watchdog, told Inside Health Policy.

Read Freeland’s report at Consumer Watchdog.

Millions of working families are struggling to pay the ever-rising costs of health care or going without, and they await what Congress will do with health care reform.

But one person who won’t have to worry about the final shape of health care legislation is H. Edward Hanway. He just retired as CEO and chairman of the board of the health insurance behemoth CIGNA.

Even if his co-pays double and his deductibles and premiums rise, his $73 million retirement bonus—not to mention $12 million compensation in 2009—should take care of those pesky increases. Read more at the Health Care Journal of Northern California.

Meanwhile, the House and Senate leaders are meeting this evening with President Obama to try to hash out the next steps in the health care battle, now that both houses have passed bills with significant differences.

One of the biggest differences in the Senate bill is a new tax on the health benefits of working families to help pay for reform.  Instead of a tax on working families that some estimate could impact as many as 40 percent of families with insurance over the next few years, the House bill uses a tax surcharge on individuals making $500,000 a year or families with an annual $1 million income. Compare the two bills here.

The latest poll from Rasmussen Reports shows that a huge majority of the general public agrees with the AFL-CIO and other advocates of real reform that the Senate tax on benefits should be scrapped. The poll finds 59 percent opposed to the tax and 64 percent in favor of a tax surcharge on the wealthiest.

Advocates for the excise tax on health benefits claim it would only apply to so-called high-cost “Cadillac plans.” But an analysis by Maggie Mahar at Health Beat shows the real victims of the tax are those of us with Ford, Chevy and Dodge plans. Read more here.

Meanwhile, in a classic case of good news and bad news, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services reports that health care spending in the United States rose in 2008 at its slowest pace in nearly 50 years. But as Merrill Goozner points out on his health care blog, Gooznews on Health:

Don’t break out the champagne quite yet. The slowdown was fed by a million people being dumped from insurance rolls as unemployment skyrocketed. The most important fact about last year’s 4.4 percent growth in health care spending (down from 6 percent in 2007) was that it still outpaced overall economic growth by a nearly two-to-one margin.

With both the House and Senate not due back in session until later this month, the content of the final health care reform bill is a guessing game. But we will keep you posted.

UNITEHERE! President John Wilhelm (left) and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka were among the 140 arrested at a San Francisco hotel sit-in for justice.

More than 100 union members, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and UNITEHERE! President John Wilhelm were arrested at a sit-in demanding justice and a fair contract for San Francisco hotel workers last night. The workers have been without a contract since August.

The sit-in in front of the Hilton San Francisco followed a march by nearly 1,000 members of UNITEHERE! Local 2, other union members and community and political supporters. Says Ingrid Carp, a cook for 29 years at the Hilton:

“We’re determined as ever to win a good contract. It’s wrong for corporations to position themselves to make billions with the coming economic recovery, and expect us to go backward.”

The action is part of a campaign to win fair contracts at several national hotel chains, including Hilton, Hyatt and Starwood. The profitable chains are using the recession as an excuse to demand health care benefit cuts in contract talks with more than 16,000 workers at dozens of hotels in San Francisco, Chicago and other cities.

Hotel workers in San Francisco are demanding a fair contract.

At the rally before the march, Trumka told crowd:

“A job is a good job because working people fight to make it one. It doesn’t matter if the job is in a coal mine or a hotel, a classroom or a car wash.

“That’s why the struggle of hotel workers here in San Francisco and across our country is so important.  If we don’t protect the wages and benefits and health care of hotel workers no job is safe, no worker is safe no family is safe.”

Tomorrow, Trumka will join workers for a rally and picket in front of the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Los Angeles. Along with the demand for justice for hotel workers, Trumka is in California this week to spotlight the need for job creation. We’ll have more on that later today.

Over the coming days—and maybe weeks—U.S. House and Senate leaders, along with the Obama White House, will be working to shape one health care reform bill from the two each chamber passed earlier this year.

Now is a good time to compare the two and we’ve posted a comparison here. After you’ve compared the bills, mark you calendar for Jan. 13 to join in a National Call-In Day to the House to demand health care reform that works for working families. See details below.

The pair has many common elements that will help working families cope with the ever-rising costs of health care and address serious flaws and shortcomings in the nation’s health care system.

Health care reform advocates say that more than three-quarters of the bills’ provisions share such features as consumer protections, more affordable coverage for active workers and retirees and seniors, expanded coverage and cost containment.

But there also are significant differences in the bills. Overall, as we have reported, the House bill comes closer to AFL-CIO’s health care reform goals, including a public health care option, a much stronger employer fair share provision and no tax on workers’ health care benefits. We’ll have more on the tax issue later today.

While the Senate bill has many good points, it is deeply flawed, too; including a tax on workers’ health care benefits and lack of a public option that would help hold down health care costs and keep insurers accountable.

Click here for detailed look at the two bills and what provisions the AFL-CIO says should be included where the two differ.

You can help fight for real reform by taking part in the National Call-In Day, Wednesday, Jan. 13. Call toll-free 1-877-3-AFL-CIO (1-877-323-5246) and urge your representative to support working families by voting for health reform that:

• Does not tax our health care benefits;
• Requires employers to pay their fair share; and
• Reduces cost—the best way to do this is with a public health care option.

Here’s a stunning fact that points both to the need for Washington lawmakers to rapidly move on massive job creation and pass health care reform:

The wages lost as a result of the 2008-2012 recession will top $1 trillion—more than the estimated 10-year cost of health care reform. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates unemployment at more than 7 percent in 2012.

Last year, in fact, the United States spent $2.3 trillion on health care—$7,681 per person, a far larger per-person cost than in western European nations where everyone actually gets health coverage (unlike the 47 million Americans here who don’t.) Yet opponents of health care reform and foes of a public-sector role in job creation continue to harp on the long-discredited theory that the private sector will come to the rescue of our nation’s ills. As Mark Weisbrot, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), points out:

For conservatives to insist that we now rely only on the private sector for economic recovery is a bit like Bernie Madoff starting a new mutual fund from prison with the slogan, “Trust me.”

When AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler is on the road talking to workers around the country, she says the issue most on their minds is jobs.

Speaking before a group of labor, management, government and academic leaders and experts at the Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA) annual meeting in Atlanta yesterday morning, Shuler said she was

bringing an SOS from the people I’ve met: Help us fix the jobs crisis.

She highlighted the terrible struggles of the nation’s young workers who are the latest victims of a 30-year corporate-led drive to create a low-wage workforce. Shuler explained how all workers—union and nonunion—enjoy better wages and benefits when unions are strong.

Shuler also went step-by-step over the AFL-CIO’s five-point plan to save and create millions of jobs in the next year.

Click here to read her entire presentation.