Labor College Dedicates National Workers Memorial

[Omaha Steve]

http://blog.aflcio.org/2010/04/28/labor-college-dedicates-national-workers-memorial/

by Mike Hall, Apr 28, 2010



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.

FULL story at link.