May 1, 2021
Gustavo ‘Kike’ Ramirez would have turned 17 this year. He died when his employer failed to provide him with a safety harness at a Nashville, Tennessee construction site on June 23, 2020.
“It was ten months ago, and I still think about him every day,” said Jenifer Enamorado Ayala, recalling her brother’s preventable fall that ended his life at age 16. She is one of the family members and co-workers remembering those who lost their lives on the job for Workers’ Memorial Week – April 24 – May 3, 2021.
“We’re fighting now to make everyone’s job safer, so no other family has to suffer this kind of tragedy,” said Enamorado Ayala, joining Workers’ Dignity in Nashville to reform the city’s building code.
Introduction
Each year on this date, labor unions, other advocacy groups and family members mark Workers Memorial Day in recognition of lives lost on the job. In 2019, the most recent year for which data is available, 5,333 workers died of traumatic injury or sudden illness. It’s as if the entire population of Dayton, Kentucky, were erased.
This Workers Memorial Day has a different timbre than previous ones, which have tended to focus on explosions, transportation accidents, falls, trench collapses and other easily measurable events, as opposed to chronic, work-related diseases, which develop over time and take an estimated 95,000 lives a year.
The Biden administration is facing rare criticism from some of its closet Democratic allies over the delay in issuing a workplace safety standard for covid.
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Workers Memorial Day: Nobody knows how many workers COVID-19 has killed April 28, 2021 10:08 AM CDT By PAI
Faces of New York s Metropolitan Transportation Authority employees who died of COVID-19 are displayed at Moynihan Train Hall, Jan. 28, 2021, in Manhattan. | John Minchillo / AP
NAPERVILLE, Ill. (PAI) Just before Halloween last year, 23 workers at the Midwest Warehouse and Distribution system plant in the Chicago suburb of Naperville got sick. Days before, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, they were close together in the company lunchroom. On Oct. 26, they started feeling symptoms and told supervisors.