Remembering the Dead and Fighting for the Living on Workers' Memorial Day

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April 28 – International Day of Mourning for Workers Killed and Injured at Work:
Remembering the Dead and Fighting for the Living on Workers' Memorial Day

Remembering the Dead

London Memorial to Site Workers Killed at Work

Campaigning for Corporate Accountability

Gas, chemicals, bombs – Britain has used them all before in Iraq:
Our Last Occupation

April 28 is marked in Britain and around the world as the International Day of Mourning for workers who have been killed, injured or become ill at work because of unsafe and unhealthy working conditions and the refusal of the state to ensure their well-being. April 28 events are being organised in over 100 countries to mark Workers’ Memorial Day. The commemorative ceremonies are also an occasion to consider and adopt measures that strengthen the ability of workers to defend their right to safe and healthy working conditions and compensation for injuries and illnesses sustained at work.

            According to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), in the past 12 months, more than two million working people around the world have lost their lives due to poor health and safety at work, with more than 1.2 million serious injuries and more than 160 million falling ill due to work-related diseases. Every year in Britain, about 300 workers are killed in their workplace, according to the TUC; about a thousand die while driving for their work and thousands more die from occupational diseases, with asbestos-related diseases alone killing 5,000.

            “Poor health and safety and unsustainable work practices are leading killers in modern times,” Guy Ryder, general secretary of ICFTU, said. “At the same time, many governments are cutting back on enforcement of standards, and allowing unscrupulous employers to cut corners and operate in a way that puts the lives of working people at constant risk and jeopardises broader social and environmental objectives.” Starting with events in the Asia Pacific region in the morning of April 28, commemoration activities will unfold across the different time zones, culminating in the Americas. A major ceremony at the ICFTU’s Brussels headquarters will involve senior union leaders from throughout Europe. In Brazil, Canada, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Portugal, Spain and Taiwan, April 28 is being recognised as an official national observance day. Union bodies in several countries, including Sweden, Bermuda and China, are backing Workers’ Memorial Day activities for the first time. The International Labour Organisation is also supporting the day.

            The figures of work-related deaths and injuries are getting worse all the time. The neo-liberal anti-social offensive which puts all the assets of society at the disposal of the rich is being stepped up. Privatisation, attacks on unions and increased competition all have disastrous consequences on the workers' health and safety. Neither the monopolies nor the governments that represent them take social responsibility for the consequences on the working people. Furthermore, workers face a situation in which those who resist are called troublemakers for causing loss of production time with their "red tape". Measures are taken to isolate and discredit them and "weed them out". This being the case in unionised workplaces, the tragedies that take place in the non-unionised sector are an untold story as are the crimes taking place in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. The only protection the workers have lies in the collective defence of their rights.

To mark International Workers’ Memorial Day 2003 the TUC is launching an online “book of remembrance” for employees killed by their work. The TUC says that trade unionists around the world will today “remember the dead and renew the fight for the living, and the TUC web-based resource will be a permanent reminder of the importance of both”.

            Visitors to www.tuc.org.uk/remembering can enter the names and circumstances of the work-related death of their loved one or colleague. The TUC is also hosting a commemoration event on the day for the TUC Executive and guests, Nick Brown MP, Minister for Work and Pensions, and Brendan Barber, TUC General Secretary Elect, are speaking.

            David Jenkins (former Bishop of Durham) will preach at an amicus MSF organised trade union church service at the Crooked Spire Church in Chesterfield (Sunday). GMB are mailing 60,000 “Bring corporate criminals to justice” postcards to the Prime Minister, Home Secretary, Health and Safety Minister and MPs. The TUC Northern region are running a half day conference on corporate accountability. For a full list of Workers’ Memorial Day events visit: http://www.tuc.org.uk/h_and_s/tuc-6584-f0.cfm

            Brendan Barber, TUC General Secretary Elect, said: “Most of the two million workplace fatalities that occur worldwide every year could have been prevented by improved safety standards. Today we remember the 10,000 British people killed by their work every year and our online book of remembrance serves as a permanent reminder of how senseless these deaths are.”

            In Britain, the TUC is calling for:

·          tougher enforcement of health and safety laws and higher fines;

·          corporate killing legislation, and the extension of the possibility of a jail sentence for all breaches of health and safety law;

·          more powers for union safety reps to influence how health and safety is managed at their workplace;

·          more inspectors to enforce the law.

The London Hazards Centre has produced an online Workers’ Memorial Day memorial – www.lhc.org.uk/kaw – to construction workers killed in the City of London since 1988. LHC says on average each year 22 people lose their lives at work in London “in what are mostly predictable and preventable incidents”, but says there are few memorials to the deceased. LHC adds that official statistics indicate that “almost three quarters of accidents at work are directly the responsibility of employers”, but penalties remain insultingly low – in 2002 the average fine for a health and safety offence was just £12,194 while the average salary of Britain’s top 100 company directors was £1.5 million. It says no employer in London has ever been sent to prison for negligence leading to the death of a worker.

Trade union activists will gather in Gateshead on Workers’ Memorial Day to commemorate the thousands of workers that have been killed in workplace accidents and to campaign for better laws to protect working people. An April 28 corporate accountability conference will be followed by a memorial service and a banner blessing ceremony. Northern TUC regional secretary, Kevin Rowan, who will be chairing the event, said: “Poor health and safety in the workplace costs employers billions every year, it also leaves families without loved ones and continues to maim and injure thousands every year. We need a stronger deterrent for employers to act more responsibly in managing health and safety in the workplace.”

By Jonathan Glancey, The Guardian, Saturday April 19, 2003

No one, least of all the British, should be surprised at the state of anarchy in Iraq. We have been here before. We know the territory, its long and miasmic history, the all-but-impossible diplomatic balance to be struck between the cultures and ambitions of Arabs, Kurds, Shia and Sunni, of Assyrians, Turks, Americans, French, Russians and of our own desire to keep an economic and strategic presence there.

            Laid waste, a chaotic post-invasion Iraq may now well be policed by old and new imperial masters promising liberty, democracy and unwanted exiled leaders, in return for oil, trade and submission. Only the last of these promises is certain. The peoples of Iraq, even those who have cheered passing troops, have every reason to mistrust foreign invaders. They have been lied to far too often, bombed and slaughtered promiscuously.

            Iraq is the product of a lying empire. The British carved it duplicitously from ancient history, thwarted Arab hopes, Ottoman loss, the dunes of Mesopotamia and the mountains of Kurdistan at the end of the first world war. Unsurprisingly, anarchy and insurrection were there from the start.

            The British responded with gas attacks by the army in the south, bombing by the fledgling RAF in both north and south. When Iraqi tribes stood up for themselves, we unleashed the flying dogs of war to "police" them. Terror bombing, night bombing, heavy bombers, delayed action bombs (particularly lethal against children) were all developed during raids on mud, stone and reed villages during Britain's League of Nations' mandate. The mandate ended in 1932; the semi-colonial monarchy in 1958. But during the period of direct British rule, Iraq proved a useful testing ground for newly forged weapons of both limited and mass destruction, as well as new techniques for controlling imperial outposts and vassal states.

            The RAF was first ordered to Iraq to quell Arab and Kurdish and Arab uprisings, to protect recently discovered oil reserves, to guard Jewish settlers in Palestine and to keep Turkey at bay. Some mission, yet it had already proved itself an effective imperial police force in both Afghanistan and Somaliland (today's Somalia) in 1919-20. British and US forces have been back regularly to bomb these hubs of recalcitrance ever since.

            Winston Churchill, secretary of state for war and air, estimated that without the RAF, somewhere between 25,000 British and 80,000 Indian troops would be needed to control Iraq. Reliance on the airforce promised to cut these numbers to just 4,000 and 10,000. Churchill's confidence was soon repaid.

            An uprising of more than 100,000 armed tribesmen against the British occupation swept through Iraq in the summer of 1920. In went the RAF. It flew missions totalling 4,008 hours, dropped 97 tons of bombs and fired 183,861 rounds for the loss of nine men killed, seven wounded and 11 aircraft destroyed behind rebel lines. The rebellion was thwarted, with nearly 9,000 Iraqis killed. Even so, concern was expressed in Westminster: the operation had cost more than the entire British-funded Arab rising against the Ottoman Empire in 1917-18.

            The RAF was vindicated as British military expenditure in Iraq fell from £23m in 1921 to less than £4m five years later. This was despite the fact that the number of bombing raids increased after 1923 when Squadron Leader Arthur Harris - the future hammer of Hamburg and Dresden, whose statue stands in Fleet Street in London today - took command of 45 Squadron. Adding bomb-racks to Vickers Vernon troop carriers, Harris more or less invented the heavy bomber as well as night "terror" raids. Harris did not use gas himself - though the RAF had employed mustard gas against Bolshevik troops in 1919, while the army had gassed Iraqi rebels in 1920 "with excellent moral effect".

            Churchill was particularly keen on chemical weapons, suggesting they be used "against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment". He dismissed objections as "unreasonable". "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes – [to] spread a lively terror –" In today's terms, "the Arab" needed to be shocked and awed. A good gassing might well do the job.

            Conventional raids, however, proved to be an effective deterrent. They brought Sheikh Mahmoud, the most persistent of Kurdish rebels, to heel, at little cost. Writing in 1921, Wing Commander J A Chamier suggested that the best way to demoralise local people was to concentrate bombing on the "most inaccessible village of the most prominent tribe which it is desired to punish. All available aircraft must be collected the attack with bombs and machine guns must be relentless and unremitting and carried on continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops and cattle."

            "The Arab and Kurd now know," reported Squadron Leader Harris after several such raids, "what real bombing means within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out, and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured, by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape."

            In his memoir of the crushing of the 1920 Iraqi uprising, Lieutenant-General Sir Aylmer L Haldane, quotes his own orders for the punishment of any Iraqi found in possession of weapons "with the utmost severity": "The village where he resides will be destroyed – pressure will be brought on the inhabitants by cutting off water power the area being cleared of the necessaries of life." He added the warning: "Burning a village properly takes a long time, an hour or more according to size."

            Punitive British bombing continued throughout the 1920s. An eyewitness account by Saleh 'Umar al Jabrim describes a raid in February 1923 on a village in southern Iraq, where bedouin were celebrating 12 weddings. After a visit from the RAF, a woman, two boys, a girl and four camels were left dead. There were many wounded. Perhaps to please his British interrogators, Saleh declared: "These casualties are from God and no one is to be blamed."

            One RAF officer, Air Commodore Lionel Charlton, resigned in 1924 when he visited a hospital after such a raid and faced armless and legless civilian victims. Others held less generous views of those under their control. "Woe betide any native [working for the RAF] who was caught in the act of thieving any article of clothing that may be hanging out to dry," wrote Aircraftsman 2nd class, H Howe, based at RAF Hunaidi, Baghdad. "It was the practice to take the offending native into the squadron gymnasium. Here he would be placed in the boxing ring, used as a punch bag by members of the boxing team, and after he had received severe punishment, and was in a very sorry condition, he would be expelled for good, minus his job."

            At the time of the Arab revolt in Palestine in the late 1930s, Air Commodore Harris, as he then was, declared that "the only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand, and sooner or later it will have to be applied". As in 1921, so in 2003.