This Week in Labor: AFL-CIO Offers Grim Daily Death Toll, Teamsters Lead Shareholder Reform Effort

Lindsay Beyerstein

At the end of each week, Working In These Times rounds up labor news we’ve missed during the past week, with a focus on new and ongoing campaigns and protests. For all our other headlines from this week, go here.

—The International Brotherhood of Teamsters announced on Wednesday that it had secured 78 percent of shares cast in support of its proposal to reform the process by which SkyWest airlines appoints its board of directors. The Teamsters’ proposal mandates that SkyWest appoint board members by majority vote. The union represents 1,600 employees at two SkyWest subsidaries. 

130 workers at the Westin Gaslamp Quarter hotel in San Diego have joined UNITE HERE Local 30, after a successful organizing drive by majority signup. Representatives for the workers started bargaining with Westin for their first contract last week.

4,340 American workers were killed on the job in 2009, according to the AFl-CIO’s latest study on workplace fatalities, Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect” (PDF), released this week. That’s an average of 12 deaths per day, in addition to the 50,000 workers who succumbed to occupational illnesses that year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Montana had the highest rate of job-related death, followed by Louisiana.

The report found that OSHA inspectors show up, on average, once every 129 years, as Mike Elk reported last week. At the current rate of inspection, it would take 67 years to inspect every workplace. According to the report, proposed cuts to OSHA’s funding would decrease the agency’s reach even further.

—Some unionized domestic workers in South Africa may get a 60-percent pay raise. The Domestic Service and Allied Workers (DSAW) Union will sit down with officials from the SA Department of Labour to hash out a deal later this month. The union is objecting to laws that exempt rural domestic workers from minimum wage laws that apply to their urban counterparts.

DSAW president Hester Stephens, a full-time domestic worker, demanded to know why domestic workers get such a raw deal: Is it because we live in the backyards of our employers? I would like the minister of labour to swap salaries with me and then go shopping with my money. I would like to see what happens.”

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Lindsay Beyerstein is an award-winning investigative journalist and In These Times staff writer who writes the blog Duly Noted. Her stories have appeared in Newsweek, Salon, Slate, The Nation, Ms. Magazine, and other publications. Her photographs have been published in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times’ City Room. She also blogs at The Hillman Blog (http://​www​.hill​man​foun​da​tion​.org/​h​i​l​l​m​a​nblog), a publication of the Sidney Hillman Foundation, a non-profit that honors journalism in the public interest.
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