In April 1983, Ray Sentes, a Canadian insulation worker with a lethal dose of asbestos already burning and scratching in his lungs, was driving through Ontario to a union meeting with his friend and fellow activist, Colin Lambert. On the way, they stopped the car for a funeral procession honouring a fire fighter killed in the line of duty. Lambert, a miner and steelworker, wondered why deaths in his own profession were not marked with comparable dignity.
Then he recalled the recent history of the uranium mine in the nearby town of Elliot Lake. From the early 1970s, the Elliot Lake miners knew that their work was killing them prematurely. The authorities, however, showed little interest. In April 1974 the United Steelworkers union called a wildcat strike that resulted in a bitterly critical government inquiry into the mine’s management, and the establishment of an annual ceremony of mourning for those whose lives had been cut short by cancer and scoliosis.
From this conversation in the car, Lambert and Sentes grew a campaign. In February 1991, the Canadian government passed a private member’s bill naming April 28th as the Day of Mourning for Persons Killed or Injured in the Workplace. The idea spread. Over a hundred countries now recognise International Workers Memorial Day. The UK government gave it official recognition in 2010.
At 11 o’clock on Tuesday morning, Boris Johnson and his Chancellor stood mute in the Cabinet Office, heads bowed. As the seconds ticked by, news cameras relayed images of groups of nurses, ambulance crews, bus drivers and checkout operators, standing separate and observant. The moment was freighted with symbolism. The 11 o’clock silence recalled the Cenotaph, though the Great War’s familiar ceremonies did not stabilise until years after the Armistice. The concluding applause showed that this was the more formal relation of the now-customary Covid carnivalesque of a British Thursday evening, when pots and pans are banged as they are on a Glasgow hen-night.
None of the sonorous TV commentary, however, acknowledged the significance of the timing; that we were watching a Conservative Prime Minister, whose journalistic output could hardly be said to be a long paean to the virtues of Health and Safety, leading a mourning ritual for personnel who had lost their lives because their employers had failed to protect them from danger; a ritual inaugurated, promulgated and promoted by the international labour movement.
Work is a four-letter word. Worker has six, but it’s still one that sounds surprising when uttered, enthusiastically, by a figure whose political home is not on the Left. “We are going to stand by the workers of this country,” declared the Prime Minister, a fortnight before he fell sick. It’s an easy thing to say: you can stand by someone as you watch them tumble from Beachy Head. But his colleagues started to speak the same language. The figure of the worker is now a presence in British Conservative discourse — a place where it has, historically, often been very hard to detect.
The principal festival of the worker, May Day, was inaugurated in 1890 by the first Conference of the Second International, which named May 1st as the day on which the proletariat might eat, drink, be merry and agitate for a radical utopian idea called the eight-hour day. Spain adopted it in 1931: when General Franco came to power he replaced it with a festival in commemoration of himself. Hitler took it up in 1933: it survived him in both post-war Germanys. James Callaghan added it to the British calendar in 1978. (In 2011, David Cameron’s coalition wondered aloud about abolishing it in favour of the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar.)
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