CANADA: Worker organized Day of Mourning event rallies second year in a row in BC

SOURCE: The North Star

Workers gathered for the second annual independent Day of Mourning rally in Downtown Vancouver, rallying behind chants like “Kill a worker, go to jail” and “When bosses lose, they’re in the red, when workers lose, we end up dead!”.

The rally held on April 27 and organized by East Van Workers Assembly (EVWA), is meant to bring awareness of deaths in workplaces due to safety lapses and disregard for implementing safe working conditions by employers. When a worker gets injured or killed on the job employers are rarely punished with more than fines.

The North Star spoke to the local chairperson for the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference (Division 945) Dustin Saunders at Thornton Park, where the attending organizations and unions made a number of speeches before starting the march. 

This is the second time the East Van Workers Assembly has organized a Day of Mourning event in opposition to the one held by the province. Saunders explained why this independence is important.

“The bosses and the government don’t take worker safety seriously. They’re only willing to reach as far as it’s profitable to do so. And there’s more at stake for workers than profit and loss.” Daniel, a member of EVWA who spoke at the event reflected this opinion, stating:

“We need to build worker power, and we need to build workplace democracy. We need to build our own independent power to fight the employers, because the employers aren’t just going to make things better for us. And the institutions like WorkSafeBC, they don’t help at all.”

Many of the speeches highlighted the need for workers to be organized in their workplaces and to build worker power. Daniel expressed this too.

“And I hope they realize that the problems that they face at work are not isolated. They’re not the only ones who are experiencing this.”

Continuing on to say, “We can come together as a working class to fight back against the employers. And we can work together to prevent all these horrific incidents and to really build a new economic system that works for everybody. And doesn’t exploit the labour of the vast majority and injure and kill them. » Doug Kellum, from the Canadian Union of Postal Workers Local 846, spoke about the costs workers pay to maintain profits for companies, comparing it to maintaining a deadly machine. The speech was centered around the death of his high school friend in a workplace accident at Canform Mill in Vanderhoof, B.C.

“Neil was 18 years old and had a job on the night shift cleaning and maintaining the equipment there. And on the night of his death, a piece of his shirt became entangled in a piece of machinery and he got pulled into that machine and strangled.”

“No one was punished or held accountable for Neil’s death beyond the mill being fined for lack of safety protocols […] The machine was supposed to be off at the time, but that made the process more time consuming and it halted production, so the pressure was always on to keep that machine running. And so the machine ate my friend. That’s what capitalism does, it’s a machine that eats people. It consumes them, whether it consumes their labour or their lives.”

To end the rally, the crowd gathered in CRAB Park. Ismail Askin, a member of EVWA, addressed the crowd and spoke about the prominence of using fines as punishment, reflecting on the over 1000 workers killed on the job year-over-year since 2023. 

“A fine is a dollar number prescribed to the life of a worker,” treated as “a business expense,” said Askin, condemning a system that prices deaths on the job. For the same criminal negligence, he noted, a worker could face life in prison while a boss “can just write it off.” “Because the system is rigged!”

(Representatives from the following unions spoke at the event: Teamsters Rail Conference Division 945. Canadian Union of Postal Workers Local 846. Ambulance Paramedics of BC CUPE Local 873. Hospital Employees Union Coast Mental Health Vancouver Recovery Club Local.)