Workers who lost their lives honored in Sioux City

SIOUX CITY, Iowa (KCAU) — Members of the Western Iowa Labor Federation joined city and county leaders at the UFCW headquarters in Morningside Friday for International Workers’ Memorial Day.

The holiday is actually on April 28, but because that’s on a Sunday, it was celebrated on Friday, April 26. The day is for the remembrance of workers who died on the job. 57 workers were honored after losing their lives at work in Iowa in the past year.

“Everybody’s coming together around a thing that we should all be concerned about,” Westerm Iowa Labor Federation President Jennifer Pellant said. “Workplace safety is an ongoing project. We work all the time to make our workplaces safer. I’m just really happy to have all these people here to recognize that.”

The ceremony consisted of 57 lit candles, and all 57 names were said out loud. A bell was rung for each person and the words “gone but not forgotten” were said after each name. Then, each light was turned off.

“It’s a somber moment, and it’s just a reminder that a lot of folks go to work never expecting what’s going to happen,” Iowa State Representative J.D. Scholten said. “And there’s a lot of folks that have an accident and there is all sorts of reasons why things happen. A lot of them are preventable. I appreciate Western Iowa Labor Federation putting this on. It really give respect to the people that have passed.”

The first Workers’ Memorial Day was held in 1989. The April 28t date is the anniversary of the date that the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 went into effect.

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