And the Bagpipers Played On…NYC Workers Reflect on Scandalous Death Toll

Local mourners gather in Manhattan’s Foley Square to read the names of workers who never made it home this past year. Photos by Steve Wishnia

By Steve Wishnia

On the chilly gray afternoon of Apr. 28, mourners laid red roses and white carnations on a table in Manhattan’s Foley Square, reading the names of workers who died on the job in New York City in the past year.

“Domingo Ramirez, 52.” “Francisco Reyes, 41.” “Galindo Moreno, 64.” “Damon White, 45.” “Matthew Webb, 23. Rest in peace, brother.”

“It’s sad that people have to be out here,” former 32BJ SEIU member Christopher Leon Johnson told Work-Bites. “Not even one death should happen.”

April 28 was Workers Memorial Day, the annual commemoration of the workplace death toll. According to the AFL-CIO’s 2023 “Death on the Job” report, 5,190 workers were killed on the job in the United States in 2021, the most recent comprehensive figures available, with another estimated 120,000 more deaths resulting from occupational diseases.

It’s a day to remember the nurses who succumbed to COVID, the coal miners suffocated by black lung, the bodega clerks shot by robbers, and the construction workers who plunged to their deaths — like Jeremy Rozan, who fell while painting a bridge over the Van Wyck Expressway in Queens last November. He was 34 and the father of two small children.

“It’s just heartbreaking,” Nicholas Milazzo, Bridge Painters union, Local 806 of International Union of Painters and Allied Trades District Council 9, told the roughly 75 people gathered.

New York City hardhat stands behind a poster of Jeremy Rozan, a 34-year-old father of two who was killed on the job last fall.

Rozan was a family man, coworkers told Work-Bites. He grew up in a family of Haitian immigrants in Staten Island, played football as a teenager, and joined Local 806 with two friends and went through their apprenticeship together. Ten years later, the three were working on the same crew, one grown close-knit over the years, socializing together on weekends.

“They made the day go by with their youth,” said an older coworker. “I wish he was my son-in-law. That’s the best compliment I can give.”

“It’s a big loss. Great guy, quiet guy. Never complained,” said Local 806 shop steward Albino Lima.

Workers Memorial Day, noted Charlene Obernauer of the New York Council on Occupational Safety and Health, is not just a day to mourn the dead, but to follow the second part of Mother Jones’ legendary directive: “fight like hell for the living.”

“Today, we recommit ourselves to fight for workers’ safety,” said New York City Central Labor Council chief of staff Brendan Griffith. “No one should be allowed to put profit before workers’ safety.”

“Our industries are different,” Gustavo Ajche of Los Deliveristas Unidos told the crowd in Spanish, “but we’re all fighting for the same thing. La lutta continua.”

Workers want to be able to “go to work and come back with all our limbs intact,” said Eno Awotoye of the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union’s Retail Action Project. Musculoskeletal disorders, such as back injuries from moving boxes, are a painful and debilitating problem for retail workers.

The 8,000 nurses at New York City public hospitals and clinics are seeking a contract where they get paid comparable salaries to nurses at private hospitals, said Sonia Lawrence of the New York State Nurses Association. The safety issue is that they died of COVID at a much higher rate during the pandemic, but still get paid as much as $20,000 a year less.

“Many, if not most of these deaths are preventable,” City Councilmember Carmen de la Rosa (D-Manhattan) said. The government’s role, she added, is to call out the employers who are “egregiously violating” safety regulations.

The government’s work protecting workers’ safety has been shamefully inadequate, state Senate Labor Committee chair Jessica Ramos (D-Queens) said angrily. Warehouse work is a “high-tech sweatshop” and there’s a “race to the bottom in the construction industry, where many immigrants are so desperate to earn a living that they’ll say “that doesn’t look so safe, I’ll get up there.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul, she added, “had the audacity to say she’d be OK with a $17 minimum wage by 2026,” in the just-concluded state budget agreement. Unions and pro-labor legislators had sought an increase to $21.25.

The audience reacted predictably. “That’s right, boo her,” Ramos said.

The memorial noted the deaths of 47 workers, but that was likely “only a fraction” of the actual number, Obernauer told Work-Bites. A nonunion worker who has a heart attack on the job won’t be in a union report and is unlikely to make the news, she explained. Occupational diseases such as cancer from being exposed to toxic chemicals might not show up for 20 years.

The last of the 47 names read out was “United Concrete worker, unknown.”

Then a bagpiper played.