In honoring fallen workers, advocates call for action in Wyoming

CHEYENNE—A silver triangle rang out 45 times in the Capitol’s rotunda. Each ring commemorated a worker who went to work in Wyoming in 2023 and didn’t return home to their families because they were killed on the job.

About three dozen people — mostly from local unions — gathered for the Workers Memorial Day ceremony on a cool and wet Monday evening.

“Every person who goes to work deserves to come home,” said Marcie Kindred, executive director of the Wyoming AFL-CIO. “Every family deserves the peace of knowing their loved ones are protected. Every life lost is one too many.”

The Rev. Delaney Piper, pastor of Highlands Presbyterian Church, led the group in prayer.

“Oh God, we do not understand why deaths like this, that we remember, that we mourn today, occur,” Piper said. “More so, we do not understand why everyone — workers, business leaders and political leaders — don’t just join in taking decisive action to prevent future deaths and to protect workers.”

The annual event recognizes Workers Memorial Day, the anniversary of the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act. The measure, in response to the carnage of workplace fatalities, injuries and illnesses, is supposed to ensure safe work conditions. Though accidents do happen, Kindred said, far too many are entirely preventable and, collectively, they point to a systemic disregard for workers.

“Behind every workplace fatality lies a story [of a life] cut short too soon and a ripple of grief that continues long after the headlines fade,” Kindred said.

Kindred and other speakers noted that Wyoming’s 45 occupational fatalities in 2023 made it the deadliest state in the nation for workers that year — a distinction Wyoming has held far too many times. Marcia Shanor, executive director of the Wyoming Trial Lawyers Association and a longtime worker advocate, said the annual commitment to demand safer working conditions appears to ring hollow among state leaders.

“We have committed, every single year for the last 20 years, to do better,” Shanor said. “And here we are, 20 years later, decades later, with one of the highest workplace fatality rates since 2007. It feels hollow to have to say those words that I have said every single year as we have remembered the great people who keep our state working.”

United Steelworkers Local 13214 President Marshal Cummings, who works at the WE Soda trona mine near Green River, believes Wyoming’s perpetual worker fatality epidemic is the result of a disregard for workers enshrined in its “right-to-work” laws. Such laws ostensibly protect employees from being forced to join a union. But, in Cummings’ estimation, the laws are specifically intended to limit the power of unions, along with their persuasion to hold employers accountable for worker safety. 

“Let’s be very clear about this: right-to-work is a lie,” Cummings said. “It’s not about jobs. It’s not about freedom. It’s about weakening the very organizations — our unions — that keep us safe.”

In states with right-to-work laws, workers see lower wages, fewer health benefits and weaker retirement security, according to Cummings.

“Most importantly, workplaces [in right-to-work states] are more dangerous,” he said. “What is the right to liberty if you can’t speak up on dangerous conditions because you might be fired if you do? What’s the right to personal happiness if you’re trapped in a system where your work, your blood, your sweat, your tears, if your sacrifice is treated as disposable?”

For now, the Wyoming AFL-CIO is focusing its legislative efforts not on the state’s right-to-work laws, but on the larger and more immediate goal of improving workplace safety, according to Kindred. The union group, the Wyoming Trial Lawyers Association and other worker advocates see an opportunity to reignite past statewide efforts that had nudged Wyoming toward safer workplaces — efforts that seemed to fizzle out after the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It shouldn’t be one time a year that we all get together and talk about why this is an important issue,” Shanor said. “We should be having those conversations at the workplace, upstairs [in the House and Senate chambers], the governor’s office, and we should have leadership by our elected officials in helping us actually make steps forward that stay in place.”