Former Churchill riding NDP MP Rod Murphy has won the USW Local 6166 Steelworker Award of Merit for his long and distinguished service to the local labour movement.
The award was announced and presented to Murphy, who lives at Setting Lake, by USW Local 6166 president Murray Nychyporuk during the annual gala banquet and dance for USW Local 6166 activists and stewards, catered by chef Joe Pereira, at the Juniper Centre Nov. 23.
Murphy, a retired schoolteacher, was first elected to the House of Commons May 22, 1979, defeating Tory incumbent Cecil Smith, who had the won the seat in the July 8, 1974 federal election and held it for a single term. Murphy held the seat through four elections for the NDP for 14 consecutive years until October 1993 when he was defeated by Liberal challenger Elijah Harper from Red Sucker Lake.
Murphy, originally from Winnipeg, recalled Saturday night that when he arrived in Thompson in 1970 he was not a union or labour activist and it was local union activists like the late Dick Martin, a former USW Local 6166 president, Manitoba Federation of Labour president, and later an elected senior executive officer of the Canadian Labour Congress, and others from what is now known as the Thompson Labour Committee, who would school him in the essential value of things like unions and co-operatives.
For Murphy, it has been a lifelong lesson. As recently as April 9, he was part of an information picket outside the Royal Bank (RBC) branch at the Burntwood Plaza, along with Wayne Levac, contracting out co-ordinator for USW Local 6166 and president of the Thompson Labour Committee, Nychyporuk, Blair Hudson, staff representative of UFCW 832, postal workers, nurses, along with other Northern residents, during the controversy over RBC's decision to outsource jobs to India through iGate Corporation of Fremont, California and the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP), which enables employers to hire foreign workers on a temporary basis to fill immediate skills and labour shortages, when Canadian citizens and permanent residents are not available to do the job.
But what Murphy is best known for and what has become his unusual parliamentary legacy is his 1990 private member's bill, the Workers Mourning Day Act, which established April 28 every year as the National Day of Mourning to remember those that have been injured or killed in the workplace. The law officially designates every April 28 as the National Day of Mourning for Persons Killed or Injured in the Workplace.
It is both unusual for a private member's bill to become law - and to mark a significant national event as well. The day was officially recognized by the federal government for the first time in 1991 and has since been adopted in more than 80 countries around the world and by the AFL-CIO and the International Confederation of Free Trade.
The Canadian labour movement in 1984 initiated the Day of Mourning for workers killed or injured on the job.
Recalling the history that led up to the National Day of Mourning on its 20th anniversary on April 28, 2011, speaking here at the Steel Centre, Murphy explained: "The National Day of Mourning was not created in isolation; this legislation was passed at the end of a decade of action on workplace safety. Over thirty years ago our federal NDP caucus decided to make workplace safety a major political issue. To point out the weaknesses in federal and provincial legislation, we visited worksites in organized tours across Canada, in conjunction with the labour movement.
"We were in mines, factories, mills, smelters, refineries, rail yards, grain elevators, prisons, fish plants, ship building facilities, nuclear power plants, and harbour facilities across Canada. We also deliberately dealt with problems faced by white collar workers, including air circulation and office equipment.
"We held public hearings.
"We heard from retired coal miners about the diseases and cancers that were destroying their lives.
"We saw how the environment and the living conditions of families were being diminished by tailing ponds, smokestack pollutants, and air quality outside the workplace.
"We heard from workers who became sick after they retired because of the chemicals they were exposed to in the workplace.
"We met with office workers who were suffering from bad working conditions, repetitive work injuries and chronic diseases, and who were not being listened to simply because it was a "bunch of women working in supposedly safe offices.
"And we met with workers who knew they were dying and kept working simply because they needed the job."
