(NIAGARA FALLS, NEW YORK) – After years of making somewhat the same speech at the Niagara-Orleans AFL-CIO Central Labor Council’s annual Workers’ Memorial that was held Saturday (May 6th) at Reservoir Park in Niagara Falls, Council President Jim Briggs delivered an emotional and angry challenge to Elected Officials and the media to “keep the focus on Worker deaths in the public’s eye in order to help eradicate the problem” in the years to come.

About 100 area Labor Leaders, Union Representatives, Elected Officials and families of those Workers who’ve lost their lives working on a variety of Niagara County projects over the years attended the remembrance event, where the names of the dead were read aloud and a procession of female Unionists and loved ones slowly made their way to the memorial where they placed flowers in their memory.

Briggs (Pictured Below/WNYLaborToday.com Photo), who also serves as Sub-District Director for United Steelworkers (USW) District 4, began his address with a personal story of finding a fellow Worker dead on the job, “his body at my feet” and then recounting how he watched “the body bag being put into an ambulance.”

Pointing to the 5,840 Workers who lost their lives on on-the-job deaths in 2015, Biggs told those in attendance “that those numbers ‘are not going down.’” 

“It’s ‘worse today,’” he said, his voice growing angry and loud.  “People are ‘getting killed every day (on the job) and it doesn’t make the papers,’ so ‘I challenge the media and our Elected Officials to tell these stories of Workers who didn’t come home at the end of their work day.’  It seems like ‘it’s not an issue’ to those in Albany and in Washington.  We ‘need to shed a light on this.”

Western New York AFL-CIO Area Labor Federation (WNYALF) President Richard Lipsitz (Pictured Below/WNYLaborToday.com Photo) also spoke, telling those huddled inside an enclosed tent on a blustery May morning that it is Organized Labor and Labor Unions who “lead” the fight to make sure Workers are protected on the job – something that has come under intense attack by the new Trump Administration.

“They say ‘if you are afraid of wolves, stay out of the forest’ - and it is ‘ordinary’ Working People who are ‘now under attack’ by the Trump Administration.  His and those Republican Congressional Representatives who ‘celebrated’ in the Rose Garden (in their attack to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act) makes you ‘cringe.’  They want to ‘take away your’ health care.  That is why ‘we must work harder than ever to make sure all Workers are protected.”

President Trump’s budget had looked to cut Department of Labor funding by 21%, at a time when OSHA’s resources still are too few and declining, according to the National AFL-CIO’s recently-released and annual Death On The Job: The Toll Of Neglect Report. 

There are only 1,838 Inspectors (815 Federal and 1,023 State) to inspect the eight million workplaces under its jurisdiction, the report said.

In 1975, when there were less than half as many, there were 1,102 Federal Inspectors.

That jurisdiction also does not cover eight million State and local Government Workers in 23 States, nor Workers classified as Independent Contractors, the report said.

Also according to the report, the number of Federal OSHA Safety Inspections has declined by 25% in the last seven years, from 34,353 in fiscal year 2010 to 25,704 in 2016.  Virtually all that decline came in Construction, where the number of inspections fell by 36%, to 15,610.  The agency issued more than 96,000 violations in 2010 and less than 60,000 in 2016.

Also addressing those who attended the event in Niagara Falls on Saturday was Mike Wright, who serves as Director of Health, Safety and Environment for the USW.  Wright (Pictured Below/WNYLaborToday.com Photo) talked about the “value on human life” and what Organized Labor is doing “to protect that life.”

“What’s going to happen under Trump’s Congressional Review Act?  It’s going to ‘wipe off’ (a number of important regulations).  ‘It will fail to reduce deaths and injuries on the job.’  ‘It will fail to enforce (the law).’  If an employer ‘can get away with it for six months, they can get away with it forever.’  ‘These will all be gone under Trump.’  ‘We must fight to make life safer – for everyone,’ be they in the Union Movement or in the community.  ‘And not just Workplace Safety - but Worker Rights, Human Rights and Environmental Justice.’  ‘What we do tomorrow and the days after are important to create a world where this doesn’t happen.’  ‘That’s what we need to do.’  We are ‘heroes’ and ‘that’s what we are called on to be,’” Wright said.