May 7, 2024 — In 2023, there were more than 13,000 workplace incidents, with 313,000 lost days for those workers, at a cost of almost $500 million in worker’s compensation.1
The human cost is even greater, and often preventable with proper protections.
More than 5,000 workers across the country lost their lives on the job last year. That equates to an average of 15 workers in the United States every day. There are families and workers who have suffered, and we must remember them.
The organized labor movement does that each year on April 28, Workers’ Memorial Day. It’s a day to honor and remember workers who were killed, injured, or sickened at their jobs, and a day for all unions to recommit to improving and expanding worker protections.
Since the memorial fell on a Sunday this year, PEF observed a moment of silence on Friday, April 26, at the memorial located at union headquarters in Latham. President Wayne Spence, Health and Safety Director Geraldine Stella, and Craig Smith from the Workers’ Compensation Board, gave brief remarks to gathered staff and news media.
“On Workers’ Memorial Day, we reflect and mourn those who have lost their lives at work and we renew our fight for safer jobs in the future,” Spence said. “This month, one of our members and two of his colleagues were stabbed in an unprovoked, premeditated attack by a patient at Buffalo Psychiatric Center. It’s a stark reminder that dangers exist in our workplaces.”
Spence looked back on the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and what employees, especially in the healthcare field, dealt with when the unfamiliar virus took hold of the nation.
“A lot of assumptions were made about what employers would do,” he said. What some did, he said, was shocking. “Some of our members were told to use coffee filters as masks as a way to protect themselves.”
It wasn’t just health care workers, he said. During the pandemic, many of our union brothers and sisters in New York City’s transit system died because they had inadequate protections at work. This year, Spence said sanitation workers in the city are being sickened by rat urine as the city battles its rodent population.
“Something as simple as eradicating rats can have unintended consequences for workers,” he said. “We must learn from our past and make changes so we can have a brighter future.”
Stella reminded attendees of a now-famous quote from Mother Jones, a fearless fighter for workers’ rights.
“Mother Jones famously said, ‘Pray for the Dead – but Fight Like Hell for the Living!” she said. “If you don’t know who she is, look her up. She wasn’t some kind of muscle-bound Amazon. She didn’t even look like the mine workers she fought so hard for. She looked more like Tweety Bird’s Granny from the Loony Toons cartoons.
“And she was just like any of us here today, someone who believed that everyone deserves to go home at the end of the day the same way they went in to work that morning,” Stella said. “Coalitions of unions fight every day. To make our worksites safer, we must come together.”
The Workers’ Compensation Board, Craig Smith said, doesn’t deal directly with workplace safety – but accidents and deaths on the job are a major concern for them all the same.
“We encourage everyone if they see something, say something,” he said. “Do anything and everything you can do to keep the workplace safe.”