On April 28, We Mourn Killed Workers. Tomorrow, We Fight

A banner containing the words "Class Struggle"

Every year on April 28, we commemorate workers killed or injured on the job.

The National Day of Mourning is observed not just by labour, but also by those who subject the working class to dangers that too often take life or limb. Flags are lowered. Statements are issued. People gather at memorials. But by April 29, it’s back to business as usual.

According to the most-recent national data, 1,057 workers in Canada died from work-related causes in 2023. This is a figure that refuses to decline, despite the oft-repeated employer claim that ‘safety is the top priority.’

In January, a contracted oil sands worker in Alberta was killed by a heavy pipe that rolled off a truck. That same month, another worker in Fort McMurray died when the piece of equipment he was operating became submerged in muskeg. In February 2025, a contractor fell to his death at a construction site south of Ottawa. A month later, a warehouse worker in Quebec was crushed to death by a forklift.

These and the hundreds of other workplace deaths we’ve come to accept every year are not freak accidents. They are the entirely predictable outcome of an economic system that treats worker safety as a cost to be managed rather than a right to be guaranteed.

Killing Workers

To understand the scale of the problem, we need to move beyond the language of “incidents” and “accidents.” What we’re dealing with is a form of structural violence built into the very organization of work under capitalism.

Consider, for example, the prevalence of occupational disease. Although deaths from falls, contact with equipment and other traumatic events are most likely to make the news, exposure to harmful chemicals and substances is far more lethal. Workers exposed to asbestos, silica dust, diesel exhaust and other hazards often die decades later, their deaths officially recorded but politically invisible.

In every province, occupational diseases are the leading cause of work-related death. In British Columbia alone, 79 of the 138 workers who died in 2025 succumbed to diseases caused by long-term exposure to occupational hazards.

The same pattern appears elsewhere. In Nova Scotia, 13 of the 22 work-related deaths recorded in 2025 were occupational disease fatalities. In Alberta, 144 workers died last year, with occupational disease accounting for 82 worker deaths.

These deaths are often slow and made invisible, but they are no less preventable. They are the result of employers systematically exposing workers to hazards, regulations that focus on mitigation rather than prevention and a compensation system that frequently denies the workplace origins of disease.

Maiming Workers

Worker death is just the sharpest edge of a much wider crisis.

In 2023, there were more than 274,000 accepted claims for lost time due to work-related injuries. As eye-popping as that figure is, it excludes the countless injuries that are unreported, denied or simply endured in silence.

The official statistics, as government agencies and researchers recognize, capture only a fraction of the real toll.

Workers’ compensation data — the basis of most national statistics — only includes claims that are reported and accepted by provincial compensation boards. That excludes entire categories of workers, such as many gig economy workers, migrant workers and others in precarious forms of employment.

While workers’ compensation coverage rates are high in some provinces and territories, in others, huge chunks of the workforce are left without protection altogether. In Ontario, 26 per cent of workers have no workers’ compensation coverage at all. In Saskatchewan, 28 per cent of the workforce lacks coverage. If these workers are forced off the job by an injury, they’re left on their own to make ends meet.

The official statistics also exclude injuries that are never reported, often because workers fear employer retaliation, don’t know their rights or simply can’t afford to lose income. Survey research from Alberta, for example, found that only 31 per cent of workers with a disabling injury actually filed a workers’ compensation claim. Studies in other jurisdictions found a similar pattern of under-reporting.

Young workers are particularly vulnerable. Many of them are entering the labour market for the first time and lack the knowledge and power to assert their rights. In 2023, nearly 33,000 accepted injury claims came from workers aged 15 to 24, despite this group making up a relatively small share of the workforce and often being legislatively prevented from working in the most ‘dangerous’ industries. And again, these are just the injuries we know about.

The Failure to Prosecute

Workers being killed and maimed on the job is par for the course in Canada.

Yet if all of these deaths and injuries are predictable, they are also preventable. It’s not a question of whether we know how to make work safe — we do. Rather, it’s a question of why we don’t.

Employers have a legal responsibility to ensure safe workplaces, but they also have a financial incentive to cut corners and shift the risks onto workers. Safety costs money. Slowing down production costs money. Hiring more staff costs money. Under capitalism, competition between firms encourages a relentless squeeze on these costs.

Government regulators, for their part, are often chronically under-resourced and tasked with policing far more powerful employers. Safety inspectors, themselves overburdened by the scale of the problem, can be reluctant to impose what penalties actually exist. Most monetary penalties are treated by bosses as a mere cost of doing business.

Criminal prosecutions also remain exceedingly rare, despite the Westray Law giving Crown attorneys the ability to hold corporations and their executives accountable in cases where gross negligence causes death or serious injury.

According to the United Steelworkers, between 2004 and 2025, criminal negligence charges utilizing the Westray Law amendments were laid in just 29 cases, only 12 of which resulted in a successful prosecution.

No senior executives have been jailed, and big corporations have largely escaped scrutiny. Fines, where imposed, have rarely been large enough to change employer behaviour.

In a country where at least hundreds of workers die each year, the criminal law has been used sparingly, and almost never in a way that meaningfully holds capital to account.

Workers, meanwhile, are left to navigate this system with limited tools. Workplace health and safety committees, while mandated in workplaces with 20 or more employees in most jurisdictions, are often reduced to forums for discussion rather than spaces to exercise worker power. Their effectiveness depends on the balance of power in the workplace. Where no union is present, that balance overwhelmingly favours employers.

This is why unionization remains so vitally important and one of the most effective mechanisms for injury prevention. Where workers have collective power, they are better able to exercise their rights to participate in health and safety decision making, know about workplace hazards and refuse to perform unsafe work.

With union density falling over decades, and the vast majority of workers in the private sector without collective representation, a growing number of workers are systemically exposed to risk without the means to challenge it.

Fight For The Living

The National Day of Mourning was established by the labour movement not only to remember workers killed on the job, but to also fight for safer workplaces. The slogan of the day is “mourn the dead and fight for the living.”

Outside of labour, however, the second part — the renewal of the fight — is often forgotten.

Commemoration without action risks becoming a form of resignation. It allows governments and employers to feign sympathy without changing the conditions that generate death and injury in the first place.

The hundreds of workers who die each year are not statistics. The hundreds of thousands more who are injured or made ill carry those consequences for the rest of their lives. If we are serious about honouring them, we have to confront the system that produces these outcomes.

This means rejecting the idea that workplace deaths and injuries are inevitable or acceptable. It means recognizing they are the result of decisions about how work is organized, how risks are managed and whose lives are valued.

It also means building the collective power to force governments and employers to put worker safety ahead of profit and growth.