2024 Workers Memorial Day: Good Jobs Safe Jobs. Protect Our Rights.

Each year, on Workers Memorial Day, we remember workers killed on the job in a work-related incident or who died from an occupational illness and renew our commitment to working together to fight for strong safety and health protections. Most work-related fatalities are preventable. Collective action is the best way to hold employers accountable for providing safe work and workplaces and to avoid these often preventable deaths.

This year’s theme is "Good Jobs. Safe Jobs. Protect Our Rights." The AFL-CIO has posted resources, including flyers, artwork, and a search tool to help you find a commemoration event near you on their AFL-CIO Workers Memorial Day web page. In addition, you can download their "Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect" report here.

CWA members continue to participate in groundbreaking campaigns across the country, incorporating clear goals for worker health and safety, strong labor standards, and safe communities into organizing and mobilizing campaigns and working with federal, state, and local officials to ensure that companies receiving public funds are held to high standards. CWA members also continue to fight for protections against deadly heat. CWA supports the Asuncíon Valdivia Heat Illness, Injury and Fatality Prevention Act, to require OSHA to pass a strong, federal heat illness prevention standard.

This Workers Memorial Day, we honor the memories of these CWA members and others whose deaths over the past year were work-related. We also remember CWA members who died from an on-the-job injury or illness in the past. They will never be forgotten.

Keyshawn Gault, 22, a member of CWA Local 1186, was a sewer technician working for the Buffalo Sewer Authority. Mr. Gault was shot while driving a Buffalo Sewer Authority vehicle during work. He died on October 26, 2024.

Jeffery James Allen III, 28, a member of IUE-CWA Local 84755, worked for DMAX-Ltd., located in Moraine, Ohio. At 9 p.m. on May 18, 2023, he was working on the assembly line when he was shot and killed over a personal dispute.

Sergeant Cory Maynard, 37, was a fifteen year veteran State Trooper and member of the West Virginia Troopers Association (WVTA)/Local 2019. He died from a gunshot wound on June 2, 2023, in the Beech Creek area of Matewan.

Keith Munro, 51, a member of CWA Local 3176, was a Customer Service Tech II working for CenturyLink of Florida. On October 6, 2023, while at a worksite fixing a cable, Keith was killed instantly by a falling tree limb. He is survived by his wife, daughter Taylor, and granddaughter, Wednesday.

Forming a union remains the most effective way for workers to get the appropriate protections they need and a voice on the job. As we grieve those we have lost, we must do everything we can to pass critical legislation like the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, so workers can freely form a union and collectively bargain. We must also continue our support for the Protecting America’s Workers Act to provide OSHA protection to the millions of public sector workers without it.

Our job is never finished when it comes to worker health and safety protections. We must safeguard the rights we have won and keep fighting for safer working conditions in every workplace, industry, and sector. That is why on Workers Memorial Day we mourn for the dead and fight for the living.

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This post originally appeared on cwa-union.org.