On Workers’ Memorial Day we remember the casualties of America’s longest undeclared war: 110,000 dead and millions wounded - every year. The war isn’t just overseas; it’s here at home and the battleground is the workplace. Nationwide, in 2006, more than 4.1 million workers were injured and 5,703 workers killed due to job hazards. Another 50,000 died due to occupational diseases from sources such as toxic chemicals. It is also our opportunity to bring together workers, their families, community-based worker centers, unions, environmentalists, and other health and safety advocates in a unified effort to alert the public and the government to our outrage and our demands for action that leads to better workplace health and safety.

Each year in California, 23,000 workers are diagnosed with a chronic, deadly disease caused by workplace chemical exposure, and approximately 6,500 California workers die due to associated chronic diseases. Workers in California are not adequately protected. AB 515, authored by Assembly Member Sally Lieber will require the OSH Standards Board to make it a priority to issue standards for chemcials known to the State of California to cause cancer, reproductive or developmental harm, and require those standards be based on healthbased data, to the extent feasible. California has data now to set those standards, avoiding duplication of resources and speeding the process -- we should use it. California workers deserve to be protected at work from harmful exposures to the same hazardous substances for which the community is protected in the environment.
Join together to observe WORKERS’ MEMORIAL DAY at the Zampa Memorial Bridge -- help fight for safer working conditions. The bridge represents the dedication of all the men and women who build these monumental projects and reminds us too of those who lose their lives in the process. This is the only bridge in the U.S. named in honor of a blue collar worker. Alfred Zampa was a member of Iron Workers Local 378, and as he said, “Anytime someone got killed on the job, we’d go jittery and go home for the day. We’d wonder, is it our turn next? If we got hurt, we couldn’t get no insurance, no welfare or nothing, until the union came up. I don’t know where I’d be without the union.”

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Healthy Communities Are Happy Communities!