Each year on the 28th April trade unions around the world organise events to celebrate International Workers Memorial Day. The purpose is to highlight the preventable nature of workplace accidents and ill health, and to promote campaigns and union organisation to improve health and safety at work. It is also a day to remember all those who have died because of their job. This year, our theme is “Unions Make Work Safer.”

Around ten years ago, the BWI adopted the slogan “Strong Unions = Safe Jobs”. The workers in trades represented by the Building and Wood Workers International do some of the most dangerous jobs of all. We are often exposed to hazardous dust and chemicals, including deadly asbestos fibres contained in building materials. We work at heights, in confined spaces, we lift heavy loads and operate dangerous machinery.

BWI members among the hardest hit by fatal "accidents" and occupational diseases.
Each year about one hundred thousand building workers are killed on site, and thousands more are injured or made ill because of bad and illegal working conditions.
Tropical loggers have about a one in ten chance of being killed over a working lifetime, and wood working machinery causes more injuries than machinery in any other sector.

The BWI believes that Trade Unions must have the right of access to all workplaces to carry out their role of representing workers on Health and Safety and to provide external Trade Union support for workplace Health and Safety Representatives. There is plenty of evidence to show that workplaces that are organised with trained Trade Union Safety Representatives are safer than unorganised workplaces.


See BWI briefing “Unions make Work Safer” here