Inside
MEETING NOTICES
See
Page 8
Volume 110
Number 8
April 17, 2009
Portland
April 28 in Salem
Governor to dedicate new
Fallen Workers Memorial
SALEM —The Oregon AFL-CIO will hold a memorial service
at the new Fallen Workers Memorial on the Capitol Mall at noon
Tuesday, April 28 — Workers Memorial Day.
Gov. Ted Kulongoski will speak and dedicate the permanent
memorial located near the main entrance of the Labor and Indus-
tries Building at 350 Winter St. NE.
The memorial service will include the reading of the names of
the 62 Oregon workers killed on the job in 2008, as well as Oregon
soldiers killed in military service last year. (A list of those names
appears on Pages 6 and 7 of this issue.) The Oregon AFL-CIO
also is asking union members to make arrangements with their
employers to observe a moment of silence that day.
Workers Memorial Day was enacted by the AFL-CIO in 1989
to remember workers killed or injured on the job. April 28 was
chosen because it is the anniversary of the creation of the Occupa-
tional Safety and Health Administration and the day of a similar re-
membrance in Canada.
The Oregon AFL-CIO’s Safety and Health Committee has been
working for four years (finding a location, securing permits, and
raising cash) to erect a memorial in Oregon. The idea started in
2005 with a resolution passed at the state labor federation’s con-
vention. Labor unions have played a role in helping construct more
than 100 permanent memorials nationwide.
Ground finally was broken in Salem the week of Feb. 23. The
memorial consists of a large boul-
der within a landscaped sitting
area in front of the L&I building.
The boulder has a union-made
bronze plaque attached to it with
the inscription:
“In memory of Oregon’s
working men and women who
suffered injury or loss of life on
the job.
MOURN FOR THE DEAD,
FIGHT FOR THE LIVING
Workers Memorial Day, April 28.
Donated to the State of Oregon by the
working men and women of the Oregon
AFL-CIO”
Photos by
Steve Lanning
To date, $37,500 of the $49,765 cost
has been collected for the Fallen Workers
Memorial. Donations can be sent to: Ore-
gon AFL-CIO, Worker Memorial Fund
2110 State St. Salem, OR 97301.
Dirty Diesel: Millions of Americans exposed at work
By DON McINTOSH
Associate Editor
It’s in the air we breathe. Diesel exhaust con-
tains at least 40 toxic air contaminants, plus soot
particles so small that they bypass filters in the
human body. And it’s everywhere in urban air.
Some people breathe more of it than others. Mil-
lions of American workers are exposed at work
to diesel exhaust — truckers and loading dock
workers, obviously, but also longshore, mar-
itime, and railroad workers, school and city bus
drivers, firefighters, construction workers, and
others who work near heavy equipment.
The good news, for breathers, is that new
heavy-duty trucks and buses have some of the
cleanest engines in the world, thanks to Envi-
ronmental Protection Agency rules that took ef-
fect in 2007. These new diesel engines are so
clean that the air coming out the tailpipe is
cleaner than the air that went into the engine —
in polluted locales like Los Angeles, anyway.
The “bad” news is that diesel engines are in-
credibly durable. That means a “legacy fleet” of
dirty older-model diesel engines is likely to be
putting worker health at risk for decades to
come. There’s a tow boat on the Columbia River,
for example, that still runs on an engine pulled
out of a World War II submarine. These engines
stick around.
So it’s the job of one union member — Kevin
Downing — to persuade owners of diesel en-
gines to take measures to reduce exhaust sooner
rather than later. Downing coordinates the Ore-
gon Clean Diesel Initiative at the Oregon De-
partment of Environmental Quality (DEQ), and
is a former president of Local 3336 of the Amer-
ican Federation of State, County, and Municipal
Employees.
“It takes a certain amount of convincing,”
Downing said, “because I really can’t guarantee
there will be fewer people sick on job, and I can’t
guarantee they’re going to see reductions in their
health insurance premiums. But there are
tremendous benefits to the community at large.”
The medical evidence, Downing says, is con-
vincing.
“Diesels always have had a reputation for be-
ing smoky and smelly,” Downing said. “But
now, what we’re discovering through advances
in medical research is that particulates are more
than a nuisance; they are a health concern.
There’s increased risk for lung cancer, cardio-
vascular disease, asthma, bronchitis, and other
health effects.”
“We can’t predict on an individual basis who
will experience these health effects,” Downey
said. “But we can say that generally with in-
creasing exposure to diesel, we see increasing
incidence of [the diseases].”
Part of the problem is that carcinogenic
chemicals produced when diesel fuel combusts
“stick” to the soot particles in the exhaust, and
those particles are small — 2.5 microns in diam-
eter, one-hundredth the width of a human hair.
The particles are so small that they can’t be
trapped by nose hair or swept out by cilia cells
that line the windpipe. They enter the lungs and
go directly into the bloodstream, where they af-
fect the metabolism of cells, causing inflamma-
tion and blood clotting that can lead to heart at-
tacks.
Non-road diesel engines are the dirtiest. In
Oregon, Downing said, construction equipment
represents as large a segment of the total contri-
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