For seven and a half years, the Bush administration has delayed and sometimes just refused to act on workplace safety and health rules that could save lives and prevent serious injuries. Had the administration acted on those stalled rules, it may have prevented the deaths of 13 workers in a Georgia sugar plant explosion in February and the more than a dozen crane accident deaths this year in New York City, Las Vegas, Miami and Houston.

Now, with time running out on the Bush White House, it is fast-tracking a secretly written rule—long sought by the business community—that could increase workers' exposure to dangerous chemicals and toxic substances on the job and tie the hands of future administrations trying to improve workplace safety.

Bandages may work OK for scraped knees, but as Working America members and union activists in Minnesota told Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) today, the nation’s broken health care system needs serious and comprehensive reform—not a “Bandage Solution."

The activists marched to Coleman's St. Paul office and at a press conference outside the office delivered a long roll of “No Bandage Solution” petitions strung together by colorful bandages and signed by more than 23,000 Working America members in Minnesota.

With the U.S. economy sputtering toward recession, working women and their families will feel more pain than in past downturns.

According to a report by the congressional Joint Economic Committee, women are now working in jobs and industries that are more likely to lay off workers than they were in most previous recessions:

In recessions prior to 2001, women could buffer family incomes against male unemployment because they did not experience sharp job losses. However, this changed in the 2001 recession as women lost jobs on par with men in the industries that lost the most jobs.

The Letter Carriers (NALC) union has endorsed Sen. Barack Obama for president.

More than 8,000 delegates at the NALC Biennial Convention voted unanimously to endorse Obama and mobilize the union’s more than 300,000 members to help elect him and other working family-friendly candidates.

Obama’s name was presented to the convention for the endorsement vote by Sen. Hillary Clinton, whom the NALC endorsed in September of last year.

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