CATEGORY / Updates

Join Us In Solidarity to Memorialize Worker’s Who’ve Died on their Job

Workers’ Memorial Day is the annual commemoration of people who have been killed on the job. 5,333 workers died on the job in 2019 [https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cfoi.nr0.htm] (3.5 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers) — on average, more than 100 a week or about 15 deaths every day. About 20% (1,061) of worker fatalities in private industry in calendar year 2019 were in construction – accounting for one in five worker deaths for the year.

We want to highlight the plight of women garment workers in the United States (from OnLabor):

On International Women’s Day, Harpers Bazaar wrote an article that paralleled L.A.’s garment workers campaigns’ to get more workplace protections in the 21^st century to the efforts of New York garment workers at the onset of the 20^th century to do the same (in the strikes that would become known as the Uprising of the 20,000). Both groups comprised a majority of female and immigrant workers; both faced exploitation, threats, long workweeks, and piecework pay. Though most industry production now takes place abroad, the article explained how an estimated 45,000 laborers continue to work in hazardous workplaces. Citing a  2016 report from the UCLA Labor Center, the Garment Worker Center, and the UCLA Labor Occupational Safety and Health, the article explained that surveys from hundreds of garment workers indicated that a majority of them worked in spaces that were so overwhelmed by dust accumulation and excessive heat from poor ventilation that it made it difficult for them to work – and even breathe. To address these issues, writer Chelsey Sanchez points toward the Garment Worker Protection Act, a piece of legislation that State Senator María Elena Durazo and advocates have introduced in the California legislature as Senate Bill 62 in December 2020. The legislation would expand liability to retailers, prohibit the practice of the piece-rate pay system, and authorize the Labor Commissioner’s Bureau of Field Enforcement to investigate and cite guarantors for wage theft.

We demand the right to be safe at work,
safe at home and safe in our communities

We at National COSH demand the right to be safe at work, safe at home and safe in our communities. We share the outrage expressed across the globe at the preventable deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and all Black people who are victims of racially-motivated police brutality and hate crimes.

Racism is morally wrong and a mortal danger to human lives. Black people are dying disproportionately from COVID-19 – not because of any characteristic of the virus itself, but because of the ongoing racism and discrimination that still characterizes how we live and work.

Black and brown people are routinely assigned the most dangerous jobs, live in the neighborhoods most exposed to harmful toxins, and suffer the most from police misconduct. Our unfair penal system also incarcerates and punishes far too many Black people. This ongoing, painful and life-threatening racial bias cannot be tolerated.

We stand in solidarity with all those fighting for real change and for a broad, inclusive vision of racial and economic justice. At this perilous moment, we stand with Black people who have been systematically denied the most basic right – the right to live and breathe, free from harm, in their own communities.

In Solidarity,
National COSH

When Ironworker Shawn Nehiley was prescribed the opioid OxyContin to treat pain for a work injury, the drug’s pull to addiction hit him like “a tornado that you feel you can’t get out of.” Nehiley is a business agent with Ironworkers Local 7 and a MassCOSH board member.  

Epidemic rates of opioid addiction and overdose are causing catastrophic harm to workers and their families. The COSH Network is building partnerships to put an end to worker pain, suffering addiction, and death.

MassCOSH has piloted a successful participatory research and action program, identifying factors that cause workers to become addicted. A powerful peer education program has reached 285 workers in its first year.

SoCalCOSH is launching a workers’ compensation clinic to help workers access treatment, alert them to the dangers of addictive pain medications and safer alternatives, as well as supporting prevention efforts.

National COSH is leading educational programs and convening groups across the country to address prevention of work factors that lead to opioid misuse, development of programs to support injured workers in avoiding opioid misuse, and improving access to treatment and recovery programs.   A new National COSH web page will provide critical resources, and efforts to address harm to workers due to the opioid crisis will be on the agenda at this year’s National Conference on Worker Safety and Health (COSHCON19).