“Today, on Workers Memorial Day, we remember and honor all workers who lost their lives this past year due to a job-related injury or illness,” said Kentucky State AFL-CIO President Dustin Reinstedler. “Each name represents a family forever changed, a community in mourning, and a life that should still be with us.”
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration began on April 28, 1971. Since 1989, AFL-CIO unions have marked April 28 as Workers Memorial Day.
Reinstedler added, “These deaths are preventable. They are often the result of unsafe working conditions, lack of enforcement, and an economy that too often treats workers as disposable. That’s why federal agencies like OSHA exist: to hold employers accountable and ensure safe workplaces for all.”
Not surprisingly, the Trump administration is targeting OSHA again. An AFL-CIO press release says “workers are dying and being injured on the job, and the Trump administration and DOGE are putting them at greater risk by enacting policies that will create deplorable working conditions, according to a new report released ... by the AFL-CIO.” The release included a link to the federation’s 34th annual report titled, “Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect, 2025.”
“Maybe workers shouldn’t be surprised” that the administration has OSHA in its crosshairs, wrote Mark Gruenberg in People’s World. “In Trump’s first White House term, 2017-21, the unspoken directive to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was ‘do nothing.’”
This time, Gruenberg added, “Trump’s puppetmaster, multibillionaire Musk, is eyeing the Labor Department, including OSHA, for more cuts by his chainsaw.”
Reinstedler said worker safety and health protections “are now in greater danger than ever before. With this current presidential administration back in office, we are already seeing renewed attacks on OSHA and the basic safety standards working people rely on. Donald Trump’s administration is once again pushing to gut enforcement, weaken regulations, and hand over even more power to corporations that put profits over people.”
Before strong unions and meaningful protection for worker safety and health, most workers toiled long hours at low pay in jobs that threatened — and often claimed — life and limb. Historically, America’s “Captains of Industry” dehumanized workers as mere extensions of machinery. The industrialists fought tooth-and-nail against worker safety and health laws and unions.
Absent labor’s vigilance, corporate America and its political allies will continue to try to turn back the clock to the heyday of greed-is-good social Darwinism, a philosophy which claimed that business worked like nature. It was “survival of the fittest” in both, Social Darwinists said. There was nothing anybody could do — or should do — about it, they claimed.
Hence, Social Darwinists argued that unions and worker safety and health laws should be opposed because they interfered with the “natural operation” of the “free market.” One Social Darwinist said such laws were a waste because they only protected “those of the lowest development.”
With Social Darwinism, millionaires didn’t have to worry about workers losing a leg, an arm, an eye, or their lives on the job. Social Darwinists said workers were inferior beings; otherwise they would be millionaires. Besides, worker safety and health laws would cost the millionaire industrialists a few bucks.
“We cannot and will not accept a future where workers are expected to sacrifice their health — or their lives — for a paycheck,” Reinstedler said, pledging the Kentucky AFL-CIO “to fighting for every worker’s right to a safe workplace. We demand that our leaders prioritize the health and safety of the people who build, teach, heal, and feed this country – not the interests of the wealthy few.”
He paraphrased the storied labor activist and organizer Mary Harris “Mother” Jones: “On this solemn day, we mourn the dead, and we fight like hell for the living.”
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