Local 40 Executive Board members attended this year’s Day of Mourning ceremony at Burnaby City Hall,
organized by the New Westminster & District Labour Council. , 2008, marked the 24th anniversary of the National Day of Mourning for workers killed and injured on the job. The National Day of Mourning is an initiative of the Canadian Labour Congress that was started in 1984. It is now celebrated around the world from Azerbaijan to Zambia. Unfortunately, workplace fatalities continue to grow in Canada. In fact, Canada continues to have one of the highest workplace fatality rates of any OECD country and this is simply unacceptable. In 2006, the Association of Worker’s Compensation Boards of Canada (AWCBC) reported 976 workplace fatalities in Canada compared to 805 workplace fatalities in 1996 – an 18% increase in a ten-year period! Since the start of this century, more than 7,500 men and women have been killed when they went to work and never came home again. That’s nearly 1,000 people every year. With a five-day workweek, that’s three, sometimes four people dying every day because of something that happened at work. Whether that something was an injury, an attack, a poisoning or a disease caused by a lack of protection from workplace pollutants – the result is the same. a country where it is acceptable for more workers to die on the job or because of their work every year? Canada has some of the best health and safety laws in the world. We know this because it was unions who fought for those laws to get passed. The problem is, governments have cut back on the resources we need to ensure our workplaces are safe and to ensure our employers are not breaking the law. Today, we spend too much time figuring out “what happened” and fixing things after it’s already too late. We need to continue the fight for more workplace training and worker education! Both governments and employers can do so much more to ensure that workers know the safest way to do their jobs and how to protect themselves from workplace hazards. Having a union with a health and safety committee makes a big difference. Having the boss and the government on your side would make an even bigger difference. When it comes to reducing the risk of injury and death by preventing the increased use of untrained and inexperienced workers, there are two more things governments can do right now. We need to continue the fight to make it illegal to use replacement workers during lock-outs and strikes. Nobody likes a scab. But the truth is that replacement workers are often plopped into workplaces and put into jobs with little or no training. Ending this abusive practice on the part of employers would prevent people from putting their health and safety at risk because they need a fast pay cheque. We need to put more pressure on the government to stop the reckless growth of temporary foreign workers as a source of cheap labour for greedy employers. Thousands of new workers, many of them desperate to come to Canada and desperate to stay, are shipped into unfamiliar workplaces that are poorly monitored because different levels of government can’t figure out who is responsible for their health and safety. Despite the confusion, despite the reports of abuse, violence and exploitation, our government has chosen to accelerate the Temporary Foreign Workers Program and, consequently, workers are getting injured and killed on the job, with oil patch workers getting killed in Alberta and farm workers dying in British Columbia. Canada has good laws, but they need to be enforced instead of conveniently ignored. That’s the key to lowering the number of workplace deaths and injuries in Canada. We need governments with the will to do this - governments elected by the people that are held accountable by legislatures filled with the people we know are truly on our side. | 
