IUF
Uniting Food, Farm and Hotel Workers World-Wide
A Call to Action on May Day 2004 - No More Dead and Injured Workers!
Posted to the IUF website 28-Apr-2004Share this article.
May Day - International Labour Day - has been celebrated by workers and their unions around the world for over 100 years. It is a day when workers everywhere demonstrate their solidarity, their resistance to oppression, and their joint commitment to struggle for a better world. It has been celebrated in jails and prisons and on the picket line. It has, at times, been violently repressed. It has been diluted and devalued, appropriated and co-opted by dictatorships. We continue to celebrate it because it is our day, the day when workers around the world assert their common identity and common goals.
Today, when our jobs, our rights, our livelihoods and our communities are being undermined by an unprecedented consolidation of global corporate power, we call upon the international labour movement to again observe the First of May as a celebration of common purpose and common struggle. The vision which animated the first international observance of May Day in 1890 - an international struggle for legal restrictions on the length of the working day - is as relevant now as it was then.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) proclaims the right of all to just conditions of employment. We work to live, but work remains a source of death, injury and disease for millions of women and men around the world. Every year, according to conservative estimates, at least 270 million workplace accidents occur. Every day, some three thousand workers die as a result. Every year, some 160 million cases of occupational disease are officially reported - and the real incidence is considerably higher.
Agricultural workers are among the hardest hit, with at least 170,000 annual workplace deaths reported by the ILO. Those who help feed the world are twice as likely to be killed on the job as workers in most other sectors. Food and drink workers face a variety of hazards and are frequently called upon to perform repetitive tasks at increasing speeds, often under dangerous conditions. Yet there are no global injury and fatality statistics for the sector - an indication of the low priority given to workplace health and safety. In many countries, crippling repetitive strain injuries are not even classified as an occupational disease. Workplace accidents and long-term illness in the service sector, including hotels and restaurants, are on the rise in many countries. For millions, safe work remains as elusive as the 8-hour work day we began to mobilize for over one hundred years ago.
These deaths, injuries and accidents are avoidable. They are a crime, not a tragedy, where greed takes priority over basic rights. We know how to work safely. We know which machines are dangerous and the measures needed to operate them safely. We know which chemicals can have fatal consequences, we know how much rest is needed to avoid fatigue on the job, and we know the ergonomic standards which are needed to avoid accidents, stress and repetitive strain.
We also know what happens when work is casualized and subcontracted and employers are legally free to renounce their responsibility for the physical well-being of those they employ. We know that injury, death and environmental destruction are the inevitable consequences when governments abandon their basic task of ensuring a safe workplace, allowing negligent employers to kill with impunity. We know that women and migrant workers are especially vulnerable when workplace health and safety standards are lowered as countries compete for investment by deregulating or abandoning systems of social and workplace protection.
Above all, we know that our bodies, our minds and even our lives are at risk where there are no unions in the workplace and workers lack the right, the power and the means to actively enforce safety on the job. China, a magnet for investors precisely because there are no independent unions, last year recorded a nine percent increase in fatal industrial accidents. But the degradation of working conditions is not limited to developing countries, nor even to countries which violently repress worker rights. Workplace accidents and injuries are on the rise in many sectors in developed countries as well. Repetitive strain injury has assumed the proportions of a global epidemic.
International standards on workplace safety exist: the Conventions of the ILO. But these standards can only be given life through the presence of an active and empowered trade union health and safety committee in every workplace. We know from bitter experience that the union presence can be an issue of life or death. Work is safe where unions are strong.
No workplace is so small that unions aren't needed to ensure safe work. Where enterprises employ few workers, or are dispersed or isolated, a system of roving union safety representatives has proven to be an effective means of enforcing occupational safety standards in countries as diverse as Sweden and South Africa.
Workplace safety is not primarily a technical issue. It is about the balance of social forces. We have the knowledge to work safely, but in all too many enterprises and even sectors we lack the organizational strength to implement it in the face of employer resistance and government complicity.
On this May Day 2004, we can affirm our joint commitment to putting an end to death and injury on the job. Let us support one another in the struggle for the universal right to safe work through the only viable means: empowering workers through their unions to negotiate on all issues affecting the health and safety of employees everywhere.