Year after year thousands of workers die on the job as a result of speedup and unsafe conditions pushed by the bosses. The lives of these workers will be commemorated by the labor movement on Workers Memorial Day April 28. Join union actions in your area!
There were 5,486 workers killed on the job in 2022, a government report issued last December reports, a 5.7% rise over the year before.
In 2023, 40 miners died on the job, the highest figure in a decade. In addition, black lung, a debilitating and often fatal disease caused by exposure to dust has risen dramatically as the coal bosses have driven the United Mine Workers out of the coalfields over decades.
Deaths of construction workers on the job increased for the third straight year in New York City in 2022. The number of construction workers in unions has plummeted, giving bosses a stronger hand. Many of those paying with their lives are immigrant workers with less protection from predatory bosses at nonunion sites.
Six construction workers died after the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed last month. The disaster was the result of the profit drive of the bosses — in the port, the shipping industry, road construction and others. Port authorities failed to construct protective barriers around the columns on a bridge with a “fracture critical” design.
Countless other workers are maimed or suffer debilitating repetitive motion injuries. Others, like rail workers, face “suicide work schedules,” on-call demands and forced overtime, increasing the danger of a disaster.
On-the-job deaths and injuries aren’t “accidents.” They result from how capitalist production is organized to maximize profits by intensifying the exploitation of workers. In the employers’ eyes, we are expendable as long as there is a steady supply of new, cheaper workers.
All work can be performed safely. This never has and never will come from relying on the government, and its heaps of regulations, which always work to the bosses’ advantage. In 2022 the Biden administration, with bipartisan support, barred rail workers from striking for safer conditions. Airline flight attendants fighting to be paid for all the time they work are buried in government red tape.
No worker has to die! Using union power to fight for workers control over safety and production is the only way we can take measures needed to protect life and limb.
In the late 1960s and 1970s coal miners organized strikes and protests that led to a revolution in their union and establishment of health clinics in the coalfields. They established union safety committees in the mines with the power to shut down production — a power they used to enforce safety and save lives.
It will take a fight to replace capitalist rule with workers power and to uproot capitalist exploitation to ensure that work is organized in a way that values the life of every worker. And to make products that work, last and are safe. That’s what Cuba’s socialist revolution shows is possible. And what the Socialist Workers Party seeks to lead workers to accomplish.