«Remembering the dead: fighting for the living». The slogan is the one that best interprets the spirit of Workers Memorial Day, the international day of workers killed, sick and injured due to work which is celebrated today all over the world. It was coined by Tommy Harte, activist of a network of associations fighting to improve health, safety and well-being at work: the Hazard’s Campaign. It was 1992 when, even in Great Britain, one of the most shocking tragedies of contemporary capitalism was recognized but it was transformed into an obvious and indifferent event.
EVERYTHING HAD GONE three years earlier in the United States when, in 1989, the AFL-CIO union obtained honoring of the hundreds of thousands of workers killed and injured at work. The journey culminated in 2001 when the International Labor Organization (ILO) declared the “World Day for Safety and Health at Work”.
The editorial team recommends:
Retired but at work: stories of those who lost their lives in Suviana
AFTER THE LATEST MASSACRES at the Esselunga construction site in Florence and at the Enel hydroelectric plant in Suviana, the unions in Italy continued to shout “Enough is enough” in marches and strikes. CGIL and UIL contest the “credit licence” established by the Meloni government in the latest contested “Pnrr Decree”. This would be an inadequate tool to contain a daily tragedy that in 2023 killed 1041 people and injured over half a million officially registered. CGIL and UIL asked for «a “real” points-based license” and not a light “credit-based license”».
The editorial team recommends:
Worker massacre in Florence, an Esselunga construction site collapses
THEY ARE DIFFERENT to ask whether a tool inspired by behavioral economics is enough to stop a capitalism that considers workers expendable lives. The nudge theory is also contested because it does not provide responsibility and allows opportunistic behavior behind the backs of those who die and those who are injured. And perhaps rewards and penalties are not enough to change the equation: the more the wheel crushes victims, the more the impotence grows in the face of an apparently irreversible destiny.
The editorial team recommends:
A thousand work coffins in Piazza del Popolo
“THE SYSTEM sanctions are not sufficient to contain this phenomenon – said Paolo Ricotti, president of the Acli patronage – especially if controls continue to be so few. More needs to be done because the issue is cultural, starting with school. There would be no shortage of resources to combat these phenomena. Inail has a forecast of an economic surplus of 2 billion euros in 2024.”
The ILO released a new report on workers’ health risks related to climate change last Tuesday. Despite the colder-than-usual spring this year, we will also face aggressive heat in the upcoming summer that has put the conditions of more than 70% of the global workforce at risk. The ILO estimates that in 2020, 80,800 people suffered workplace injuries due to heat exposure and 67 people died as a result of working in extreme heat.
WORKERS the more exposed are those paid the least. Immigrants, labourers, builders, riders, logistics workers and those paid in a fragmented and intermittent way. And there are also pensioners. In 2023, 75-year-old crane operator Ciro Adinolfi died of a heart attack in front of his son while working on the construction site of an Amazon warehouse in temperatures close to 40 degrees. The ILO mentioned this in its report.
THE CONFEDERATION European Union of Trade Unions (CES), on the occasion of the electoral campaign for the European elections on 8-9 June, presented a manifesto in which it calls for the adoption of European legislation that establishes the temperature limits above which it will be compulsory to stop work. «Adapting working hours to avoid the hottest hours of the day – said Giulio Romani, secretary of the CES – It is a common sense way to protect workers and maintain productivity».
YOU HAVE TO ASK whether it is instead the search for “productivity” that creates the conditions for the massacre that we want to remedy. The contradiction between capital and labor is the elephant in the room. Everyone knows him, but no one sees him.
