Dying of unsafety. Victims of work around the world

The Global Rights Booklets are a new initiative, one that inaugurates 2022, the twentieth year of publication of our annual Report on Global Rights. The Booklets are a series of simple, single-topic books that focus on the important and interconnected issues our research and analysis deals with. This first issue focuses on work-related fatalities, a hidden and forgotten global tragedy that should never be thought of as an 'accident', but rather as an incident with precise causes and responsibilities. Today these fatalities go unpunished and are not dealt with, despite existing solutions and remedies to stop this daily massacre, which are centred on prevention, on making work safe and dignified, on investing resources, on adapting laws and changing corporate culture. The right to life and occupational health must be treated, considered and recognised as a fundamental human right. Only prevention and decent work will guarantee safety, and these should be adequately addressed by political and government agendas, which often help to depoliticise occupational mortality and turn it into an administrative, statistical or technical problem. The Covid-19 pandemic has increased occupational risks, accidents and diseases, as well as deaths. This phenomenon concerns all sectors, though perhaps it is most visible in the health sector. If, as has been repeated and promised, "nothing must be the same again", one of the areas in which we can and must start is the safety of workers, whose life and health cannot be considered a commodity or a cost, but a fundamental right to be protected and invested in.