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Labor Secretary to Honor Fallen Workers on Workers Memorial Day |
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Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, who has made worker safety and health a priority, will join workers, union leaders, elected officials and college staff to commemorate Workers Memorial Day by helping break ground for a new national workers memorial at the National Labor College (NLC) campus in Silver Spring, Md.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka, Mine Workers (UMWA) President Cecil Roberts and NLC President William Scheuerman will Join Solis at the ceremony. The public also is invited to attend.
The April 28 ceremony will be followed by a traditional candle-lighting ceremony and honoring of all fallen workers. Workers Memorial Day, April 28, is the day workers in the United States and around the world honor those killed and injured on the job and call for improved workplace safety.
With workplace fatalities claiming more than 5,600 deaths annually, Solis already has begun to reverse years of worker safety neglect by the Bush administration. Earlier this month, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) moved quickly to protect workers from a serious lung disease caused by diacetyl, the artificial butter flavoring added to popcorn and other food products. Solis also appointed longtime health and safety advocate Jordan Barab as acting administrator for OSHA.
Also, under the Obama administration, OSHA has entered the 21st century by providig RSS feeds for the most recent information on the Federal Register, agency rule interpretations, news releases and QuickTakes updates. Click here to sign up for the feeds.
Her new emphasis on safety is sorely needed. A report by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Inspector General released April 1 reveals that the Bush administration’s OSHA systematically failed to perform follow-up inspections for employers who put workers in serious danger. That failure could have led to nearly 60 deaths on the job.
If you are organizing an event, be sure to visit the AFL-CIO Workers Memorial Day website. You will find materials to help you stage your event with this year’s theme, “Good Jobs. Safe Jobs. Give Workers a Voice for a Change.” The materials include:
- Workers Memorial Day flier.
- Workers Memorial Day poster.
- Workers Memorial Day clip art in English and Spanish: Mourn for the Dead, Fight for the Living and Good Jobs, Safe Jobs. Give Workers a Voice for a Change.
- Workers Memorial Day stickers.
- Workers Memorial Day events form.
- Workers Memorial Day proclamation.
- Safety and health update (February 2009).
The AFL-CIO Workers Memorial Day online tools include links to a collection of workers’ memorials in the United States and around the world and poems and other tributes to workers killed on the job. Also, next week, the AFL-CIO will release the annual death on the job report.
As part of the preparation for the events and ceremonies to honor workers who have been killed or injured on the job—and to demand improved workplace safety—the AFL-CIO has set up a special Workers Memorial Day Facebook page.
On the page, you can connect with other workplace safety activists, learn about Workers Memorial Day events in your area or reach out to others to help organize actions where you live. The page also has a gallery of Workers Memorial Day posters from previous years.
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Indianapolis hotel workers are currently engaged in a struggle of historic proportions. The Employee Free Choice Act is not just being fought for in the Senate and House Chambers in Washington, but in the streets of Indy, where huge majorities of hotel workers at the Westin, Hyatt, and Sheraton hotels are demanding that the corporations respect their right to a fair process. The passage of EFCA would give these workers the union. Here is a video about their struggle:
http://gallery.mac.com/lynfilm#100093/RaisingIndianapolis_WEB&bgcolor=black
First I want to Congratulate Las Vegas Sun Reporter, Alexandra Berzon, upon receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for her stead fast and lengthy investigative reporting on the Construction Deaths in Nevada.
Click here: Sun wins the Pulitzer Prize - Las Vegas Sun
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/apr/21/sun-wins-pulitzer-prize/
As important as these “Death in the Workplace” stories are, there still remains an even more tragic and troubling reporting that needs to surface in order to publicly expose the conduct faced by those workers that don’t die, yet are also injured on the job. Injured on the job only to be “Killed” by the Administrative Claims Process designed to deliver timely treatment, compensation and benefits, all needed for the injured to recover and protect their families after an on the job injury.
The conduct of employers and insurers, starving out injured workers, denying medical treatment without a lawful basis, conspiring with medical providers to build phony cases in order to cut off the lawful delivery of benefits and compensation to injured workers, and holding out injured workers and their families until they are forced to give up on the facts and the truth, these are just a few of the realities faced by injured workers today as these greedy employers and insurers place Profits above People.
These techniques and patterns of conduct are well known by these insurance profiteers, as this is their signature, and a standard operating practice, when for increased margins and profitability, an employer and insurer will conspire and work together to create a “Hostile Workplace Environment” against the responsible and lawful reporting of legitimate workplace injury claims.
In cases where injury on the job results in an injured worker who needs treatment and benefits, an employers safety experience and insurance profit margin can drive an ugly pattern of conduct intended to coerce and encourage lawful and would be claimants from coming forward with lawfully required reporting. These are the signals of a safety culture tainted by mixed signals and polluted by a greedy profit motive intent on making margins off the backs of injured workers. These are the same Corporations that would demand that “Ethics” and “Codes of Conduct” guide their activities, but their history of “Contested Claims” tells another story.
Injured Workers are at RISK every day, so we continue to ask that our new Labor Secretary, Hilda Solis, Please take the necessary steps required to expose and investigate this well know FAILURE within the Delivery of Health Care Treatment and Benefits to our Injured Workers. If you need a guide to show you the crimes driven by Commerce, you need only contact me, I will show you the path of the Injured Worker.
This is a Crime against our Injured Workers and this conduct must stop NOW!
Congratulations Alexandra Berzon and the Las Vegas SUN!! Please Protect Our Injured Workers TOO!!
Your Comments and Feedback are most Welcome!
Craig Michie - Injured Worker
NvVIAW@aol.com
Nevada Voters Injured At Work
As we honor and remember those who have lost their lives to workplace injuries, toxic chemical exposures, and other occupational illnesses, let us also renew the fight for safe workplaces, on this the 39th anniversary of the creation of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency with responsibility for protecting the health and safety of America’s workers.
The passage of the OSH Act was lauded as a “legislative landmark of the utmost importance to every family in our nation “ “ designed to ensure a safe and healthful work environment.”
Tragically, that promise has failed - in a myriad of ways. Now, with a new administration and a new Secretary of Labor, we have a chance – But make no mistake – If we want to save the lives and health of workers, OSHA must be overhauled.
Federal OSHA has fewer inspectors today than in 1975 and can inspect workplaces on average only once in 133 years. In MA, it’s once in 121 years. The average penalty for a serious violation is $909. – not much of a deterrent. Worse, in almost half of all fatality cases, employers do not pay, and OSHA fails to collect.
And when we talk about worker deaths, what’s the magnitude of which we speak?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) will tell you that 5,488 workers died from their work in 2007, the most recent year for which their data is completed. But the number of worker fatalities recorded by BLS is a gross under-report.
Worker deaths from toxic exposures, other work illnesses are conservatively estimated by NIOSH and other researchers at 50,00 to 60,000 deaths each year, or ten times the number of fatalities from work injuries. It is a disaster of monumental proportions that goes largely unrecorded. The United States has no comprehensive occupational health data collection system.
OSHA standards lag far behind current knowledge of chemical exposure. To quote Joseph LaDou, OSHA standards “are not health based, but industry compatible. …they are not designed to protect workers, but to keep industry competitive.”
Occupational illness and injury deaths are now the eighth leading cause of death in the US. (LaDou, J. 2006). We need to make right this terrible, continuing American tragedy.
To quote Senator Ted Kennedy, “It is vital to remember that every decision to weaken safety laws and OSHA’s enforcement of them imposes huge costs on society. By virtually eliminating the deterrent effect on employers, these decisions lead to more workplace …injuries,” illnesses, “and deaths. The emotional toll of these tragedies on workers and their families is incalculable, and they also have a very clear economic cost …” The total cost $170 billion per year, of which a little more than ¼ on average is paid by employers and their insurers, with almost ½ the cost falling on families, and the rest on taxpayers. (Leigh, J.P., et al., 2000).
“On this Workers’ Memorial Day, we must rededicate ourselves to protecting every worker, in every industry, in every part of this country.” (Kennedy).
This means strengthening our worker safety law and regulations; restoring 7th amendment rights to injured, or ill workers, and to the families of those who have died from their work — And implementing a corporate manslaughter law, similar to Canada’s, to hold employers responsible for the depraved indifference that maims and kills workers.
To paraphrase Mother Jones – the famous mine union organizer and orator, “grieve and remember the dead, but fight like hell for the living.”
By Patrice Woeppel, Ed.D.
Author: Depraved Indifference: the Workers’ Compensation System