Worker’s Memorial Day touches everyone
By Marianne Brown
On your job, have you ever experienced cuts and lacerations,
bruises and contusions, strains and sprains?
If you have, you are not alone. According to California’s
Division of Labor Statistics and Research, 2,104 workers under the
age of 18 and 65,552 workers ages 18-24 suffered work related
illnesses or injuries in 1991.
These may be shocking statistics for you because most young
people do not work in what are thought to be the "hazardous"
industries such as agriculture, mining, construction and
manufacturing. Instead, they are concentrated in three types of
work: sales and service (especially food service), administrative
support and laborers/handlers. It turns out these jobs also have
their hazards. One case tells the story:
A 19 year-old college student was working part-time at a fast
food restaurant. While operating an electric cabbage shredder, she
caught her hand in the machinery. She had never been given any
health and safety instruction, nor been warned about the hazards of
this equipment. Since her initial emergency treatment, she has had
four operations and undergone months of painful, exhausting
physical therapy. Her hand is permanently disfigured. Formerly a
starting guard on her school’s basketball team, she is no longer
able to play competitive sports. She received a one-time disability
payment of $2,300.
This young woman’s employer did not have a necessary guard on
the cabbage shredder nor an Injury and Illness Prevention Program
(IIPP) in place. Such programs have been required in all California
workplaces since 1991, and would include training on how to operate
the shredder safely. This tragedy could have been prevented, and
the paltry Worker’s Compensation award never would have been
necessary.
Today, April 28, has been designed by the American Federation of
Labor-Congress of Industrial Relations (AFL-CIO) as Worker’s
Memorial Day to commemorate the tens of thousands of workers who
are killed, injured or permanently disabled on the job each year.
Young people of college age are included in these statistics. The
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health estimated
that for 1992, more than 64,000 young people were treated for
occupational injuries in emergency rooms.
And, California reports indicate that 12 workers under the age
of 20 died from occupational causes in 1991.
Today is the time to pause and remember those who have suffered
or died on the job  from the scores of federal workers who
were killed in the Oklahoma bombing last week, to the more than 600
California workers who died on the job last year, to your peers who
have suffered from work-related disabilities, even to the
construction worker who was injured yesterday at UCLA by falling
steel on a construction site near Dickson.
Today also marks the 24th anniversary of the implementation of
the Occupational Safety and Health Administration  the
governmental agency established to ensure that employers provide a
safe and healthful workplace for their employees. Federal OSHA is
currently under attack from the new congressional majority, and
here our state equivalent, Cal-OSHA, is the target of "reform"
efforts that many believe will seriously weaken it. These proposals
may affect you because Cal-OSHA regulates where you work now and
where you will work after you graduate, if you stay in state.
If you would like to know more about your workplace health and
safety rights and efforts under way to protect them, please join us
today at noon at a Worker’s Memorial Day gathering in 3517
Ackerman.
Brown is the director of UCLA-Labor Occupational Safety and
Health (LOSH) Program,which is part of the UCLA Labor Center and
the Center for Occupational and Environmental Health.