Vol. 79/No. 18      May 18, 2015

The action was one of many Workers Memorial Day commemorations around the country organized for the thousands killed and millions injured or sickened on the job over the past year, victims of the bosses’ relentless drive for speedup and profit and against the unions.

One of the latest casualties in New York was Trevor Loftus, 40, who died at a midtown Manhattan hotel construction site April 24.

The number of Latino workers killed on the job is rising, a 2015 AFL-CIO report titled “Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect” says.

In New York City, 74 percent of fatal falls among construction workers were Latino or immigrant workers, the Center for Popular Democracy reported in September 2013. Of these, 86 percent were working for a nonunion boss.

Federal and state government agencies tasked with monitoring mine, mill and factory bosses’ compliance with safety regulations are notoriously ineffective. There is one Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspector for every 71,695 workers, the new AFL-CIO report notes.

A total of 1,882 federal and state inspectors are supposed to cover 8 million workplaces. That means federal OSHA inspects job sites “once every 140 years, on average” and state inspectors “once every 91 years,” the report notes.

And the bosses and government don’t value workers’ lives very highly. When bosses were found liable by OSHA for workers’ deaths, they paid an average penalty of about $5,000.

The breadth of this year’s Workers Memorial Day events reflects growing working-class resistance to employer-imposed job conditions endangering workers’ lives and surrounding communities. On the front lines have been rail workers, who are fighting against boss demands for one-person train “crews” for crude oil transport, and oil refinery workers, 7,000 of whom struck for more than a month for safety and against forced overtime.

In St. Paul, Minnesota, hundreds of construction workers joined a ceremony near the state Capitol to condemn the deadly impact of workplace-related diseases, reported the Twin Cities Daily Planet. Building Trades workers highlighted the names of Larry DeCrosse, 82; John Phillips, 78; and Alan Crepeau, 70. They succumbed last year to mesothelioma, an incurable cancer caused by asbestos exposure, which kills about 3,000 people in the U.S. each year.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4,585 people were killed on the job in 2013. Another 50,000 died from occupational diseases such as mesothelioma and black lung, which strikes coal miners.

The International Labor Organization estimates the annual death toll from workplace chemical exposure to be more than 651,000 worldwide — one worker every 52 seconds.
 
 
Related articles:
Auto workers discuss fight to end two-tier wages
Striking oil workers rally at Marathon HQ in Ohio
On the Picket Line
 
 
 
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