Labor & Employment Law

Honor Fallen Workers with Memorial Brick at Labor College Site

By Mike Hall

Workers are remembered by their co-workers, family and friends with a named brick in their memory as part of the Workers Memorial to be built at the National Labor College.

Construction of the National Workers Memorial to honor individuals killed on the job is under way at the National Labor College (NLC).

Dedicated last April on Workers Memorial Day, the memorial with more than 10,000 bricks and scores of granite benches and pavers will be finished in time to commemorate this year’s Workers Memorial Day, April 28.

If you would like to have a brick or other remembrance engraved and installed in time for this year’s ceremonies at the campus in Silver Spring, Md., you need to purchase them by Feb. 28. Memorial bricks may be purchased for $125, pavers for $2,000 and granite benches for $10,000. For more information, click here. 

Last year, the first brick was dedicated by Bricklayers President John Flynn to Louis Mitchell, a member of the union who died in 2007. The second brick, sponsored by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, honored his father, Frank, a Pennsylvania Mine Worker (UMWA), who died in 1999 of black lung disease.

Hundreds of family members, co-workers and unions have made memorial contributions. One local chose to remember a Steelworker (USW) who was electrocuted on the job. Co-workers from a Transit Workers (TWU) local sponsored the memory of a bus driver who was crushed by her bus, and an AFGE local sought to remember a government rescue worker who was crushed in a mine rescue at the Crandall Canyon coal mine in Utah in 2007.

Labor College President Bill Scheuerman says contributions to the memorial “mean much more than the brick and granite structures being constructed.”

Each sponsorship serves as a reminder of the thousands of workers every year whose lives are lost while on the job.  Brick by brick and bench by bench, we are building awareness of the human toll caused by unsafe working conditions.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on January 21, 2010 (boomark / email).