House Republicans last night blocked a bill that would provide long-term medical care and monitoring for the nearly 60,000 Sept. 11 rescue and recovery workers and community members whose health is at serious risk from their exposure to the contaminated and toxic rubble at Ground Zero of the World Trade Center.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka called the vote a deep disappointment and said:

Helping the thousands of 9/11 responders and others who are now sick as a result of their exposures at the World Trade Center should not be a partisan issue. But sadly, the majority of House Republicans voted against this bill.

The 255-159 vote in favor of the bill included 12 Republicans. But because the bill was on what is known as the suspension calendar used for non-controversial bills, it needed a two-thirds majority to pass. What’s controversial about helping 9/11 heroes who faced toxic mix of chemicals, jet fuel, asbestos, lead, glass fragments and other debris?

Trumka noted that the cost of the bill was paid for by closing tax loopholes for foreign companies operating in the United States.

It appears that some Republicans and business groups, including the Chamber of Commerce, are more concerned with protecting the interests of the foreign based companies who try to avoid paying taxes than helping those who answered the nation’s call on 9/11.

Rep. Michael E. McMahon (D-N.Y.) said the Republican arguments against the bill are “ridiculous and baseless.”

It is utterly unconscionable to me that my Republican colleagues decided to put their own petty, partisan agenda ahead of the solemn moral obligation to help the countless volunteers who were there for us in our nation’s greatest hour of need. Shame on them.

Rep. Carol Maloney (D-N.Y), one of the bill’s chief sponsors, said she expects the House to take up the 9/11 medical aid bill when it returns from its August recess under normal rules that require just a simple majority for passage.

Nine long years after the attacks, the living victims of 9/11 are still suffering. We must pass this bill. It is the least we can do as a grateful nation.

Last year, more than 2.8 million workers were victims of mass layoffs or plant closings that should have fallen under the 1988 WARN Act, which requires employers to give workers and communities advance notice before shutting down. But, as a new AFL-CIO report reveals, the plant closing “has proven severely flawed.”

Numerous reports have concluded that most layoffs are not subject to WARN Act requirements; few employers act in compliance with the law; and penalties for noncompliance are so lax that they do not act as deterrents.

The AFL-CIO report, “The Public Availability of WARN Notices: Lack of Accessibility and Disclosure Calls for Reform,” examines the difficulty in obtaining WARN notice information that can be vital in planning for the economic and jobs impact of a mass layoff or plant closure.

With access to comprehensive and easy-to-use data bases of past layoffs and plant closures, organizations working to increase employment in states can look for trends in past economic dislocations as they chart their paths forward.

We presented the report to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration today.

Essentially, the WARN Act requires employers with more than 100 full-time workers to provide 60 days advance notice of a plant closing to local and state officials, the workers and their union.

Community leaders and workers who are given this advance notice can then work to mitigate the effects of the job losses by offering retraining programs, providing social services and working to avoid layoffs altogether.

But nearly each state has its own set of rules and regulations on handling WARN notices, which the report describes as a:

flawed jumble of websites, offices, and email accounts, which organizations and individuals must keep track of to obtain information on economic dislocations across the country.

Most states have Rapid Response Teams to assist employers, workers and communities during a mass layoff or plant closing. But the report  found that in many cases when those coordinators tried to push for easier and more WARN notice public disclosure, the coordinators reported they had:

encountered pressure from businesses and politicians when they tried to push for disclosure on websites.

The report examines states with difficult or flawed disclosure rules and states with best practices and makes a series of recommendations to the Labor Department, including:

• Issuing a regulation, training and employment notice or guidance letter requiring states to forward any WARN notices received to the Department of Labor for inclusion in a centralized, publicly accessible database.
• Developing a standardized format for WARN notices and conducting an educational campaign to encourage adoption of the format in the submission of notices.
• Adopting the best practices described within this report for the handling of WARN information within that centralized database.
• Connecting WARN data to other site-specific employment information using unique, site-specific nine-digit identification numbers.

Click here for a copy of the full report.