Today is Workers Memorial Day. Take a moment to remember and honor those workers killed and injured on the job. Just this month, 29 miners lost their lives in the West Virginia mining disaster. On average, 16 workers die each day from workplace injuries, 134 are estimated to die from work-related diseases, and thousands more are injured on the job. No one should die from making a living.
Today, I invite you to pray IWJ’s Litany for Workers Memorial Day.
When workers are killed, families are torn apart. When workers are injured, families suffer. On Workers Memorial Day, let us honor not only the workers but also the families they left behind. May the memory of fallen workers inspire us to continue and strengthen the fight for workplace safety.
This year it should also be called to mind that one of those killed in the tragic plane crash that killed many of Poland’s political and civic leaders was Anna Walentynowicz. Ms. Walentynowicz was the labor activist who spoke out for worker rights in communist controlled Poland. For her efforts at organizing workers, and advocating for just and equitable treatment of workers, she was fired from her job. Her firing led to the founding of the free Solidarity Trade Union. Keep her memory in mind today as well.
From The Guardian:
A welder and then a crane operator at the yard, in her youth Walentynowicz was a member of Poland’s Communist party. Appalled, however, by the corruption that she encountered and the suppression of free speech, she became involved in producing and distributing Robotnik Wybrzeza (Coastal Worker), a newspaper which she handed out in the shipyard, even to her Communist bosses.
The trigger for her disaffection with the party was said to be her discovery that one of her bosses had stolen money from her fellow employees and used it to participate in a lottery.
It was not only corruption that incensed her but the gradual realisation that far from helping to make Poland a better place for the people, workers’ rights and freedom of speech were being trampled on.
Despised by the shipyard’s management, later in her working life she would be segregated from other employees for her actions. The crisis would come, however, when the management finally moved against her in August 1980, firing her a few months before she was due to retire.
It was this clumsy action that led to the strike, which occurred in the midst of a period of profound political and economic problems for the Communist regime. The consequence of that action, led by then electrician Lech Walesa, was the emergence of Solidarity and also the Gdansk Agreement, which saw the government give in to the workers’ demands for a new social contract. Within two years the union would have 10 million members.
Also, from New York State’s Labor Department: Rochester Workers Memorial Day Ceremony and Capital District Workers Memorial Day Commemoration.
