Workers’ Memorial Day is an opportunity for us to remember those who have gone to work, never to return home again.

A friend of mine Steve, and I, were 17-year-old apprentices at the Royal Mail in 1987. Steve’s dad also worked there as a HGV driver and had done so for some time. He would always come round to our frames every morning and give us a hand and a dig out. Always looking out for us, not just his lad, but all of us.

One Saturday morning I got back around 9.30am from a delivery and the Sorting Office Manager (SOM) asked if I had seen Steve, which I hadn’t and presumed he was getting back from his delivery. Thinking no more of it I went home.

When I went back into work on the Monday, Steve wasn’t in. On the Saturday after he got back to the office from his delivery the SOM had taken him into his office to tell him that his dad had been at work, he’d gone to pick up a parcels load from a firm and he was involved in an accident. His artic trailer was faulty and when he went to check the back of it, it rolled and crushed him.

Those who were working indoors on that Saturday morning tell of the roars of devastation they heard when Steve was told. We lost a colleague, Steve lost his dad, that day would never be forgotten.

That is why Workers’ Memorial Day is an annual opportunity not just to remember, but also to campaign for those in work so that the lives of those lost, like Steve’s dad, haven’t been lost in vein. More than that, we can put checks and balances in place in our best efforts to make sure that they never happen again.

Strong unions save lives. Unionised workplaces are known to be up to 50 per cent safer than non-unionised workplaces. That is because we don’t take health and safety as some burdensome regulatory red tape, we take health and safety as a matter of life and death, and unions make a huge difference.

Back in late February I went on a visit to meet Usdaw reps at Weetabix in Northamptonshire. It is an award-winning site where accidents at work have been reduced by 60 per cent. It is a great example that unions make a difference, and we should not be shy in telling people about it.

Celebrating what unions do isn’t a once-per-year, week-long list of events, it is a day in, day out role for all of us to publicly remind workers of what we do and the difference we make. The press won’t do it for us – we need to do it, and be proud of it as well. Unionised workplaces are safer workplaces. It’s a great story and one that needs to be told.

Sometimes the headlines are a convenient distraction for those who want a return to unregulated workhouses, and Brexit is a prime example of that.

Many of the health and safety laws we now have in the United Kingdom are underpinned by the European Union. Sixty-three per cent of British health and safety regulations that were introduced between 1997 and 2009 originated in Europe – that is 41 different laws, leading to a reduction in accidents, injuries and fatalities.

Part of our campaign for current workers has to include a level playing field across the EU. Brexit would lead to the UK potentially being the poor relation. A renegotiated deal to access the market, with no rights to go with it. Undermining the UK workforce and making it one of the potentially worst off, least protected and most dangerous of places to work. That is not a future I want to see built for the working generations to come.

So let us be positive in our message that strong unions bring better terms, conditions, pay and safer workplaces in the UK. And in this historic year, with an EU referendum we use this Workers’ Memorial Day to once again put the positive case for health and safety rights back in the headlines.

Because of the work trade union reps do, lives are saved. It is as simple as that. Remember the dead, and always fight for the living.

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Lee Barron is regional secretary of the Midlands Trades Union Congress. He tweets @UnionBarron