The news occurs about workplace accidents with numbing regularity. Perhaps numbness is a way to cope with realities too awful to contemplate. All we want to know, usually, is that the victim was no one known to us.
June 23 — The 22-year-old construction worker from Baghdad died when he toppled from the 28th floor of a downtown Toronto condo project . . .
June 27 — Breaking news: Construction worker killed on Milton work site . . .
July 2 — St. Thomas, Ont. — Police say a 55-year-old construction worker was struck and killed while directing traffic . . .
Shirley Hickman has lived those stories. She knows how little newsprint or airtime is usually spent telling them. She knows how briefly they are news at all.
“In 1996, our 20-year-old son went to work at a City of London arena,” she told the Star. “And Tim never came home.”
In the years since, every time she hears of another life lost in the workplace, another survivor so badly injured that his or her world has changed forever, Hickman has the same thought: “What happens to those families?”
Read more about Workplace accident victims: One mother’s fight via Workplace accident victims: One mother’s fight | Toronto Star.
