Good afternoon sisters and brothers. My name is Jeremy Baiman and I am here today on behalf of the Central Ohio Workers Center. Our mission is to advocate for, and organize with, immigrants and workers in Central Ohio who do not yet have the protections of a union contract. We seek to build a culture of solidarity in Columbus, where all immigrants are valued for their contributions and all workers are respected for their labor.
Today, on Workers’ Memorial Day, we are proud to be here with our labor family to reaffirm that respect for the labor of all workers includes a respect for the basic right of all workers to go home at the end of their shift.
It is a day which calls for both solemn reflection for those we have lost, and for righteous anger that in 2019, many workers still do not enjoy this basic right to return home to their families. In 2017, the most recent year for which comprehensive data is available, the AFL-CIO reports that 174 Ohio workers went to work and did not come home. This same year, more than 101,000 workers came home with a work-related injury or illness.
It is the narrative of the bosses, sisters and brothers, that the days of the unsafe workplace is over. That more than five decades of the Occupational Safety and Health Act have rendered the likes of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Greenwich Village, New York, and the Willow Grove mine explosion in St. Clairsville, Ohio nothing more than distant memories of a more dangerous time.
It is certainly true that progress has been made. Thanks to the labor movement, millions of workers now enjoy the health and safety protections of a union contract. Millions more are covered by legislative initiatives and whistleblower acts. And yet, the price of speaking out is still to great. Too many workers still must make the impossible choice between sustenance and safety;
Workers like Harvey Beavers, crushed to death between a stack of boxes and a conveyor belt at the Bath and Body Works warehouse in Reynoldsburg in January. Workers like Hoyt McMaster, who just days later died pinned between precast forms at the Babbert Concrete plant in Lancaster. And workers toiling for the world’s richest man at the Amazon warehouse in Etna, which according to news reports registers at least one 9-1-1 call for illness or injury per day, and whose community was recently asked to approve a five-year, 6.5 million dollar property tax levy just to keep the local fire department operating under this strain, despite Amazon itself paying zero property taxes under a 15 year tax abatement.
The situation is even more dire for immigrant workers, routinely exploited and at much greater risk for dire consequences if they speak up, including incarceration and deportation. The AFL-CIO reports that nationally, 927 immigrant workers died on the job in 2017. Fresh Mark, the Canton meatpacking plant which was the site of a massive ICE raid in June, has seen three immigrant worker deaths since 2011. It is important to acknowledge that the anti-immigrant actions and rhetoric of the current federal administration makes workplaces less safe, as the most vulnerable workers’ fear of retribution creates a dangerous culture of silence.
Sisters and brothers, we have work to do. We must continue to defend workers who are retaliated against for raising health and safety concerns. We must continue to organize workers into the ranks of unions so that they can bargain, not beg, for proper equipment and protocols. We must not be satisfied until each and every worker can clock out and go home safely each and every day.
The words of labor icon Mary “Mother” Jones ring as true in 2019 as they did in 1919, let us “pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.”
Thank you.
-Jeremy Baiman