A Worker's Memorial (originally posted at Feministe 10/20/07)

People, I’ll be driving up I-55 again (the story of my life) to attend a family wedding (and a birthday party for two family members after the reception!), so I’ll be MIA for the rest of today. I trust that our fabulous moderators will continue to monitor my posts in my absence. Since I don’t have time to concoct an original post for today, I’m going to post a speech I gave for the April 2006 Workers ‘ Memorial in Illinois. Hope you like it. It’s the only formal speech I have ever written/given.

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First, it is an honor to come before my brothers and sisters in the Labor movement and speak a few words; I was asked to represent the area Building and Construction Trades Council this year, and I hope the words I give you today are worthy of that request. (*Bunch of personal identifying information omitted). You will hear the name of (my local) several times during our solemn ceremony in honor of our brothers and sisters who were killed on the job; I hope that the words I speak today do justice to their memory, also.

I stand here today to represent the Building Trades. We like to think of ourselves as the people who build America! You can see the products of our work daily; our work changes your landscapes, your lives. But we are not often seen—not directly. We are the folks you drive by, past the construction sites, past the orange cones and the reminders to slow down; we are the people working in the bitter cold, sweltering heat, high winds and bad weather. In the mud, slop, snow, various on-the-job dusts free for the breathing. We are the people you drive by and think, “Damn! I’m sure glad I’m not doing that!” Strangely enough, for the visibility of our projects, we remain invisible. And that invisibility is not limited to the building trades; it permeates our labor movement as a whole.

There are no current representations of us in the mainstream media. We have long since fallen out of favor as subjects of photographs or other works of art. There are no interviews, roundtables or summits disseminated in the news media featuring the knowledge and opinions of our leaders, let alone that of the rank and file. Newspapers have long since eliminated their “labor beats.” There are no holidays in honor of our national heroes of labor; no day off for Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, Asa Philip Randolph, Cesar Chavez. No chapters in our children’s schoolbooks that give recognition to our history, our struggles, our triumphs, or our defeats.

Making us faceless, makes us disposable.

Without our presence, media imagery of unions and union workers is distorted. This distortion serves to make our interests—and those of our unorganized brothers and sisters, unimportant. Whining, even. Aren’t we glad to just have a job?

Last year, 5,524 workers were killed on the job; almost all of them in easily preventable accidents. No doubt we will be reminded by pundits that workplace deaths were down this year. That is true. As our jobs have been outsourced, so have on-the-job deaths. But not all of them. Last year in Texas, an explosion at BP Amoco killed fifteen workers and injured 170. This particular accident gave me pause for the cause; many of those killed were tradespeople working for outside contractors—and I’ve been one of them, at a different refinery here in Illinois. Surprisingly, OSHA fined BP Amoco $21.3 million, the highest fine in OSHA history. Unsurprisingly, that fine represents two hours of BP profits. Just the cost of doing business. Not to pick on OSHA too much—since its inception in 1971, OSHA has bee responsible for cutting workplace fatalities by 60% and occupational illness and injuries by 40%. For that, OSHA itself has been subject to cuts.

During the Reagan administration—when else?—the OSHA staff was slashed from 3,015 in 1980, to 2,355 in 1984 (today, that staff is slightly over 2,200). One third of its field offices were closed, and inspection staff was reduced by 25%. There was a new sheriff in town, and his name was Thorne Auchter. He doggedly went about his master’s business, dismantling the work done during the Carter administration, when OSHA was an agency serious about its assigned task of protecting our nation’s workers. Auchter was known for unilaterally dismissing citations against employers, if he thought the inspectors had been too aggressive, too diligent in their work. He did his work well. So well, in fact, that in February of 2000, Auchter’s own son, Kevin, a culinary student working his way through school as a demolition laborer, was killed on the job when a 40- to 70-ton chunk of concrete fell several stories from a silo and crushed him to death. OSHA gave the contractor two citations, and fined them $14,000 for the lives of the two workers killed in that accident. Auchter sued the contractor and subcontractor on that job; the trial was scheduled to begin tomorrow. The case was settled out of court on Friday for $2.3 million.

When we think of workplace deaths, we tend to immediately flash on the well-known, large stories—like BP Amoco and the Sago mine tragedies. Perhaps we also think of the ones a little closer to our own home, like that of IBEW Brother Tyler Gardner, a young apprentice from Local 34 in Peoria, who was electrocuted, leaving behind his wife and baby. But seldom do we consider the cost of our jobs to our lifespan—what I like to call “death on the installment plan.” Building Trades workers are routinely resented for our high hourly wage. Yet it is not generally acknowledged that we trade that wage for the years of our lives. The average man in the Unted States lives to be 76; the average electrician can statistically shave off over a decade of those years. Exposure to hazardous substances on the job takes its toll in the form of cancers, lung disease, and other life-shortening chronic illness. The EPA require testing for fewer than 200 of the 62,000 chemicals in commercial use. Yet in a case involving a chemical accident or injury, the EPA can be your bst friend—laws regulating the environment are much stronger than laws ostensibly protecting workers on the job. In 2001, the Motiva Corporation was fined $175,000 when a tank of sulphuric acid exploded, killing worker Jeffery Davis. Last year, the Justice Department fined the company an additional $10 million—a penalty that could be imposed under existing enironmental laws. It seems that the resulting acid spill killed fish in a nearby stream. The moral of this story? If you’re a worker who’s going to die on the job, take some fish with you.**

OSHA has been increasingly reliant on “voluntary alliances” with corporations, in response to their own understaffing. Yet the General Accounting Office recommended against such “alliances”, as their own audit revealed that there was no evidence of these alliances reducing occupational health and safety problems. Last year, OSHA made a ruling on protecting workers from exposure to hexavalent chromium, a chemical known to produce lung disease, liver and kidney disease, disorders of th central nervous system, skin disorders and tumors—yet left hexachrome’s use in concrete out of that ruling when manufacturers balked at the cost of protective measures. Many of us here are familiar with the Formosa chemical explosion that took the lives of several area workers in 2004. That same year, the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazards Investigation Board recommended to OSHA that they add reactive chemicals to their Process Safety Standard in response to the 108 workplace deaths from reactive chemicals in preceding years. OSHA has yet to do this, preferring instead to form yet another “industry alliance” and post information on their website—information many workers never see.

But it is not just government agencies entrusted with protecting the lives and health of our workers that have abandoned their posts; last year, our very own AFL-CIO eliminated the Safety and Health division in a response to the “Change to Win” coalition,*** a group most noted for their mutinies with the AFL-CIO and Building Trades’ councils. This move is supposed to redirect more money and staff towards the task of organizing; to which many folks of my background, the ones most at risk (electrical workers have the seventh-highest rate of occupational deaths, ironworkers the fifth, roofers the sixth, and construction laborers in general the ninth) to respond, “What?! Organize and die?” This has not been our history. At the turn of the 20th century and beyond, workplace deaths and injuries were a strong galvanizing force for the union movement. They always have been. The forming of the IBEW itself in 1891 was largely a response to the high rate of on-the-job deaths for linemen—in some places, one out of every two. I would be remiss in my duties as a representative of Building Trades f I did not mention the incredible short-sightedness of this move. Many smaller unions were reliant on the research and database of the national AFL-CIO when it came to health and safety. Their own short budgets couldn’t support a department of that nature on their own. This is an important tool in our struggle that should not be abandoned. Workers are still eager to organize; many of them on this very issue.

Today, unions account for only 12.5% of workers in the United States, and only 7.9% of private sector workers. This is significantly down from the 1950s, when one third of U.S. workers were organized. I mentioned the lack of media imagery of union workers earlier. Yet, there are times when we are mentioned—when we’re portrayed as corrupt, as on the Sopranos, or as lazy, shiftless, perennial coffee-break takers. when labor issues are at stake, and we can’t bbe ignored, our leaders are shown as large, scowling, cigar-chomping brutes and called “labor bosses.” I highly recommend a book by William J. Puette, a teacher from Hawaii and himself a union member, entitled Through Jaundiced Eyes: How the Media View Organized Labor.**** I heard Brother Puette speak on this subject at an IBEW conference I attended, and one of the stories he told involved his own Local’s negotiations with their school board. The President of his Local was often referred to in area newspapers as the “union boss” and her tough-talking, hard-nosed attitude revealed in the most creative writing the paper had to offer. The problem was, her five-foot, ninety-pound physique and soft-spoken voice did not easily lend itself to the image being created for her. No problem—the papers didn’t print her picture, and the television showed images of her larger, more “tough” looking membership, neglecting to run clips of her actual speech. Brother Puette also mentioned how these “labor bosses” are presented in the newspaper—with their ages following their names, as if in Police Beat instead of the Marketplace section. Rank and file union workers are almost never represented in the mainstream media, except in the funny papers, as the butt of jokes in comic strips. This has been going on for so long, it no longer registers as a calculated move; bias against union workers is largely unconscious. Sometimes it even affects ourselves. White workers would do well to pay attention to the critiques raised by people of color concerning media bias and lack of representation in the media, and how this affects the public consciousness. This is every worker’s issue. It affects the creation and administration of public policy. It impacts our lives and our health.

It is especially impacting the lives and health of Latin@ workers. While workplace deaths have decreased slightly in recent years for workers in general, they have dramatically increased for Latin@s. A recent newspaper article quoted a Denver, Colorado nonunion contractor who boldly told a reporter that he only has to pay his undocumented workers $10-$12 an hour, whereas he would have to pay $35 an hour (which he stated included worker’s compensation to U.S. workers. and he felt quite comfortable having this in print!***** He appealed to the economic interests of U.S. homeowners, by asking if they’d like to pay another $20,000 on a $200,000 house. Back in the day, we had songs in the labor movement like “Which Side Are You On”, sayings like “An Injury to One is an Injury to All”, and various exhortations to remember who we were and where we came from. It would be good to remember those traditional responses to divide-and-conquer strategies in the face of race-baiting, anti-immigrant diatribes. Border crossings have increased—and not only in the U.S.—as a result of global anti-labor policies formulated behind the closed doors of the WTO. If blame is to be placed, let’s place it where it belongs—at the feet of those who thought NAFTA, GATT and other trade agreements unhealthy to the lives of working people on a global level, were a fine idea. An Injury to One, is an Injury to All.

Back in the day, workers had our own forms of media. We published our own newspapers (in several languages), held rallies and night classes for our memberships. We did not rely on others to tell our truths. As corporate control of the media tightens, as our publically-owned analog airwaves are scheduled to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, I can’t help but wonder why we are not more active in pursuing our own interests in this realm. We need to do a better job of supporting the pro-labor media that exists, and create new forms of our own. Our survival, individually and collectively, depends on it. We will not hear from the mass media how the erosion of the eight-hour day contributes to rising injury and death rates at work. We will not hear how understaffing and doing more work with fewer people results in more illness, injury and repetitive-use injuries. We will not hear critiques of the repeal of the Illinois Scaffolding Act; we will not get answers to our question on why Illinois still does not have an Electrical Licensing Act. We may be informed that we have a new OSHA director and a new MSHA director, yet we won’t hear about their backgrounds or why they were chosen to lead these critical agencies. New OSHA director Edwin G. Foulke made his bones being the OSHA expert at Jackson Lewis, a huge law firm specializing in union busting. Richard Stickler, our new MSHA director, was the head of mine safety in Pennsylvania during the time of the Quecreek mine near-disaster, where fortunately nine trapped miners were rescued. He was notable for presiding over mines wih an injury rate double the national average. Every year, we celebrate the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a giant who lived among us—and every year, during the retelling of the story of his assassination, the mass media neglects to mention that the sanitation workers’ strike that Dr. King went to Memphis to support, was in response to the deaths of two workers. Even here in Springfield, with the plethora of historical information offered to tourists, there is no mention of John L. Lewis, or that his house still stands near Washington Park. There is no plaque to identify it; it remains an unacknowleged part of our past.

We, in this room, are the working class. We did build America. We have given our blood, our sweat, our tears. Our bodies, our shortened lives. Yet,

There are no parades, no ticker tape, no magazine covers celebrating the working class Man or Woman of the Year, no commemorative stamps, no moment of silence, no medals, no gold stars, no flag-lowering, not even the dignity of having our history taught in the schools.

We don’t ask for much. For today, we ask to be remembered. That we also not die in vain.

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*It won’t be the end of the world if I’m outed, but I do like a certain level of personal privacy.

**Those last two lines were blatantly stolen from the blog Confined Space, a phenomenal blog about workplace safety that is now defunct. The goodbye post is here. Confined Space had a roundup every Friday of all the workers killed on the job the previous week.

***My opinion on “Change to Win” can be found here.

****Check my post here

*****I ain’t makin’ this shit up. I originally saw it in print in the Parade magazine in the Sunday paper. You can find it online here and elsewhere.