Today is the World Day for Health and Safety at Work. I will be attending the trade unions’ Workers’ Memorial service in Melbourne this morning as I do every year.
The stories of those who have died at work keep my OHS morals grounded in the reality and the humanity of workplace safety. It reminds me of the lives behind the policies and why I do the work I do.
Over the weekend I was able to help a friend of mine provide a personal context to workplace deaths by encouraging Sheryl Dell to talk about her own experience with a father who did not die at work but died FROM work.
Sheryl Dell’s father lost his battle with mesothelioma in February 2008 after recovering from a series of injuries, including a year of blindness, sustained over his career as an industrial chemist.
Sheryl says “Yes, it’s a tragedy when someone goes to work and never comes home but thousands more, like my father, come home to die.”
“My father had to fight disbelief as well as the disease,” she said. “In the end, he joined a class action and got a small payout that helped him pay for healthcare. It wasn’t about money though. What we really wanted was to hear someone say ‘I’m sorry’.”
It was a double injustice for Sheryl. Long before losing her father to the deadly workplace cancer, her family had been scarred by the year of blindness that followed a chemical splash.
“We had to tip-toe around him,” she said. “We never had friends to visit because it was too hard to explain why there was this angry man sitting alone in the dark,” she said. “He found it very difficult to deal with and it ground my mother down. She never was the same happy-go-lucky person ever again – it was a real loss of innocence. I had only just begun to appreciate him and discover how much we could share when I lost him forever.”
When I look around at the wives, children and husbands standing at the Workers’ Memorial in Melbourne, I cannot imagine the pain and disruption that a workplace fatality has caused them. I work in OHS in order to minimise the possibility of this happening in my own way.
Sometimes we need to take inspiration from tragedy.
1 Comment
November 14, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Thanks so much for your words of wisdom and your desire to create awareness.
Mary Vivenzi
United Support & Memorial for Workplace Fatalities