Workers’ Memorial Day, held on 28 April every year, brings together workers and their representatives from all over the world to “remember the dead and fight for the living”. In 2022 the theme is: “Make safe and healthy work a fundamental right”.
Join us in Blackburn at 11.30am on Thursday 28th April as we return to having a brief assembly to mark the occasion besides the “memorial tree” at Sudell Cross.
Unions secured agreement at the International Labour Conference in 2019 that occupational health and safety should be recognised as an International Labour Organisation (ILO) fundamental right at work – the decent, universally accepted and binding rights protecting all workers, everywhere. The ILO Centenary Declaration accepted that “safe and healthy working conditions are fundamental to decent work”.
The March 2022 meeting of ILO’s Governing Body has agreed an amendment to the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, to include occupational safety and health, and this will be on the agenda the UN agency’s International Labour Conference in June. According to ILO: “If adopted, the proposed amendment would indicate that all ILO Member States would have an obligation to respect and promote safe and healthy working conditions in the same manner and with the same level of commitment as the four principles currently covered by the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work.”
Most of the world’s countries – 187 states – are members of the ILO. Recognition would mean occupational health and safety joined freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining, the elimination of forced or compulsory labour, the abolition of child labour, and the elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation as one of ILO’s top-level rules.