WORKERS’ MEMORIAL DAY is held around the world to remember workers who have been disabled, injured and killed while at work. 

Never has the day carried greater significance than in 2020 as key workers are on the front line keeping the whole of society going while a coronavirus pandemic is raging. 

This Tory government’s clear failure to plan and prepare for this pandemic is causing key workers to become unwell, and the death toll is rising. 

Failure at all levels in the NHS and in care homes alongside continuing denials of the seriousness of this crisis have led to a toxic situation where there is now a lack of testing, personal protective equipment and risk assessments being carried out.  

A crisis within a crisis has been created as each day more and more workers in our NHS and care homes are lost to us forever.

Day in and day out, worried NHS and care workers are going into work in a state of fear and anxiety as they find that PPE is either not there or running low. 

Managers are using a range of methods to bully them into unsafe practices and silence their voices.

Today we will be protesting outside Queen Elizabeth Hospital to support a GMB union member who is facing the sack because he insisted on proper PPE. 

The job of a trade union is to secure workers’ rights to a safe environment. We can never accept any situation where hospital workers are disciplined for asserting their right to be safe. 

GMB union is so concerned about gaping holes in health and safety practices up and down the country during this pandemic that we have launched the Get Me PPE campaign. We will fight until every worker feels safe and protected at work.

Exposing all of the wrongdoing is not enough — we must hold the government to account and we must make sure that failures in leadership, of the magnitude we are experiencing now, never occur again. 

We must be clear what this means in practice — it means driving the market ideology out from our public services, it means an end to privatisation and bringing outsourced contacts back in-house. 

It also means making sure the key workers who have proved that it is they and not the billionaires who protect us and hold society together are recognised and rewarded for what they are doing for all of us. 

Key workers must now receive the proper pay and terms and conditions that they need and deserve and that have been withheld from them for so long.

On Workers’ Memorial Day let’s honour the dead and wholeheartedly commit ourselves to fight like hell for the living.

Helen O’Connor is GMB Southern Region organiser.