Saturday 28th April 2018 marked International Workers Memorial Day, with events taking place formally and informally in almost one hundred countries to mark the occasion (writes LUKE CAMPBELL (above)).
First recognised by the Scottish Trade Unions Congress (STUC) in 1993 and by the UK Government in 2010, International Workers Memorial Day occurs on the 28th April each year, and brings together workers, trade union members, social activists, and community members to commemorate those who have died at work or as a result or workplace activities.
Operating under the slogan of ‘Remember the dead – Fight for the living’, a wealth of events took place around Scotland with activities organised in Edinburgh, Bonnybridge, Kilmarnock, Alexandria, Glasgow, Dundee, Falkirk, Aberdeen, Bathgate, Hamilton, East Dunbartonshire, West Dunbartonshire, Coatbridge, Kirkcaldy, Inverness, and Irvine.
Ahead of our local event in West Princes Street Gardens, I was invited to lay a wreath on behalf of Unite the Union’s Not-for-Profit Edinburgh Branch – where I have been an active member for three years.
Chaired by Kathy Jenkins (Scottish Hazards), and with guest speakers from throughout the Edinburgh workforce, this year’s theme centred on unionised workplaces as safer environments and on remembering the 1984 Bhopal disaster (during which more than 500,000 people were exposed to methyl isocyanate gas).
Among the Edinburgh event speakers and those placing commemorative wreaths this year were Mark Lyon (Unite the Union), Migrant Pride (a predominantly Spanish-run workers organisation), Councillor Joan Griffiths (Deputy Lord Provost for the City of Edinburgh Council), Shereen Benjamin (UCU), Unison, and the Protest in Harmony choir.
Of particular emphasis across these events was that despite the Health and Safety Executive 2016/2017 annual report suggesting that only nineteen worker deaths had occurred in Scotland over the year, when deaths through work-related suicide, occupational illnesses, deaths of members of the public, and accidents on the road, at sea, or in the air were factored in, Scottish Hazards estimate that twelve people die each day in Scotland through workplace safety issues.
As I laid a wreath of behalf of the Unite the Union Not-for-Profit Edinburgh Branch I delivered the following speech:
‘My name is Luke Campbell. I’m here representing the Unite the Union Not-for-Profit Edinburgh Branch.
‘We lay this wreath today in recognition and remembrance of workers here and around the world who have died in their workplace as they earned to provide for their families, to keep themselves in food and housing, and to defend their rights of safe working conditions.
‘With increasingly precarious, lone working, and isolated conditions, with short term contracts and poverty wages rife in both domestic and international contexts, with more than twelve work-related deaths and many more injuries each day in Scotland due to working conditions, we cannot allow employers to forgo the rights of workers to basic protections and safe conditions in the workplace.
‘With more than eighty people in attendance today, we come together in our trade unions, our campaign groups, and in our own right, with our intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, ability, sexuality, culture, and class, to remember and to commit to our basic rights and safe working conditions.’
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