Labor & Employment Law

Labor College Dedicates National Workers Memorial

By Mike Hall

The number on the brick in AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler’s hand was 5,214.

This afternoon, she told the union members, job safety advocates and others at the National Labor College (NLC), 5,214 represents the number of workers killed on the job in 2008. In short, said Shuler:

That’s 14 a day.

Today, the NLC dedicated the National Workers Memorial in Workers Memorial Day ceremonies. The recently completed memorial features granite benches and brick pavers engraved with the name of union members killed on the job. The ceremony paid special tribute to the workers killed in the most recent workplace tragedies:

• 29 coal miners killed at Massey Energy Co.’s Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia;
• Seven workers killed at the Tesoro refinery in Washington State;
• Six victims at the Kleen Energy Systems plant in Connecticut; and
• 11 oil platform workers who are presumed dead following an explosion of the Transocean Ltd. rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

Pointing toward the bricks and benches that family members and co-workers have engraved with the names of those killed on the job, Shuler said:

Every brick represents not just a worker lost?but a family left behind, a wife without husband, a child without a mother, a mother without a son.

(Click here for information on sponsoring a brick or other remembrance at the National Workers Memorial.)

Shuler called on Congress to pass the Protecting America’s Workers Act (H.R. 2067, S. 1580) and the S-Miner Act, both of which will strengthen workplace safety laws, toughen enforcement and increase penalties for employers who violate the law. She also called for “labor law reform to giver workers a voice on the job for safety.”

In a Workers Memorial Day op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka writes that the penalties employers face for violating workplace safety laws “are so weak and so ripe for manipulation that they hardly matter.”

You can get more jail time for harassing a burro on federal land than for killing a worker.

Tragic, but true. Willful violation of workplace safety laws that kills a worker carries a maximum jail term of six months for a first offender. It’s a year for burro harassment.

More than 360,000 workers have died on the job since the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act) was passed in 1970, but only 79 cases have been prosecuted and defendants have served just a total of 89 months behind for the workers’ deaths. The civil penalties employers face “are just as toothless,” says Trumka, an average of $5,000 per worker death after legal wrangling.

He writes that while “decades of struggle by workers and their unions have improved workplace safety significantly,”

eight years of neglect, inaction and outright hostility by the Bush administration eroded our protections. Focus shifted from protecting workers to protecting employers, claiming corporations could police themselves and actually allowing crackdowns on workers who had the nerve to get hurt on the job.

Trumka says the OSH Act has been tweaked over time, but after 40 years, “It’s time for a complete overhaul,” which could be accomplished by passage of the Protecting America’s Workers Act, the S-Miner act and labor law reform.

On this Workers Memorial Day, with loss of life at Upper Big Branch mine still fresh on our minds, the least we can do to honor fallen workers is to fight to pass these laws. We must never forget that a good job must be a safe job first and foremost.

In a Workers Memorial Day proclamation, President Obama said that on the 40th anniversary of the OSH Act it’s time to renew the nation’s “commitment to ensure the safety of American workers.”

The legal right to a safe workplace was won only after countless lives had been lost over decades in workplaces across America, and after a long and bitter fight waged by workers, unions and public health advocates. Much remains to be done, and my administration is dedicated to renewing our nation’s commitment to achieve safe working conditions for all American workers.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on April 28, 2010 (boomark / email).