Completed petition A Permanent Memorial to Wales’s Workers

‘We call on the National Assembly for Wales to urge the Welsh Government to fund, either directly or through the Arts Council of Wales, a permanent workers memorial’.

Last year, eleven people died at work in Wales. Death and injury at work loom large in Wales’s history. The tragedy at Gleision last year was a reminder for many of the horrors of the past.Yet despite the way that workers’ deaths have shaped Wales’s past and continue even today, there is precious little to show that we remember them. Some trades unions marked the International Workers Memorial Day with rallies and so on, but it was just a day, soon over and forgotten.It is surely time for a permanent memorial for all Welsh workers. Some sites of past disasters have memorials, such as Senghenydd and Gresford, but there is nothing to mark the lives of the many others who have died at work. A permanent workers’ memorial would show our respects to all these workers, and it would also be a salutary reminder of the importance of much-maligned health and safety.

It’s the fifth anniversary of the 2007 Corporate Manslaughter Act this year - how good it would be for the Welsh Government to announce, this year, that it was establishing a permanent memorial to be revealed in 2014, the 40th anniversary of the Health and Safety at Work Act.The Bevan Foundation is an independent charity (no. 104191) concerned with social justice in Wales. We are changing Wales through research, debate in our publications and events. For more information see www.bevanfoundation.org