President's Perspective
Honoring Our Fallen Working Brothers and Sisters

(April 20, 2010) Every April 28, the nation’s union members observe Workers Memorial Day.
       
For worker-journalists worldwide, the mortality news was not good last year. A total of 71 – the largest annual figure since the Committee to Protect Journalists started keeping statistics in 1992 – were killed in situations in which a motive was confirmed: The victims were journalists and they had gotten too close to the story for someone’s comfort.

You can examine the stories behind the deaths at http://cpj.org/killed/2009.

We should consider ourselves fortunate. No working journalist has been murdered in the United States since 2007, when former Newspaper Guild member (Detroit News) Chauncey Bailey was killed for his reporting on criminal activities by the staff of an Oakland, Calif., bakery that had once been a hub of legitimate community activism.

And while journalists tend to get more ink relative to their profession than those who labor in other industries, the amount we can expect to get pales in comparison to the awful blast in April at the Massey Energy coal mine. It didn’t take much journalistic enterprise to learn that the West Virginia mine had been written up for unsafe working conditions numerous times by federal authorities, and to conclude that Massey management's typical response of appealing the violations or simply paying fines dragged out the process of actually of fixing the problems.

By the way, it was a nonunion mine: Union miners most likely would have refused to go into the mine in the first place if they had known that their lives were in jeopardy.

In response to these cold, hard facts, we are given two historic charges. One is, “Don’t mourn – organize!” The other: “Mourn the dead, and fight like hell for the living.”

Both practices are highly encouraged.