Joint statement by the Labor Commission and the Women’s Commission of the American Party of Labor–

On Nov. 11, Amber Czech, a 20-year old welder for Advanced Process Technologies in Minnesota, was bludgeoned to death on the job by a male coworker, David Bruce Delong, who has confessed to the cold-blooded killing. Czech’s murder comes from a culture of hostility against women in trades, whose harassment frequently goes unreported, underreported, or insufficiently addressed, resulting in women being more than twice as likely to die by murder on the job than their male coworkers.

Workplaces, especially in construction trades, are not only unsafe for women due to these misogynistic interpersonal relations, but also because of a lack of access to proper protective equipment, yet the capitalists who operate these industries have little incentive to rectify these problems as it is more profitable to push women out of the workforce and back into their homes to perform unpaid reproductive and domestic labor.

The NCBI notes that while women make up approximately 7.5% of the workforce in heavy industry, they suffer from 10% of workplace injuries. Additionally, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 2019, from a total of 454 workplace homicides that year, men were the victims of 7.5% of workplace homicides, while women made up 20% of those murdered on the job, demonstrating that women are nearly three times as likely as men to be killed at work.

There are unverified claims that Czech had filed five Human Resources complaints against the confessed killer, all of which had gone ignored. Regardless of whether such formal complaints were filed, Delong admitted to law enforcement that he simply “did not like her” and had been planning to murder her.

Male chauvinism rears its head in other ways in the construction field, such as women reporting “discomfort and even safety risks due to ill-fitting PPE (personal protective equipment). Standard equipment, such as hard hats, safety vests, and gloves, is typically designed for men, leaving women to struggle with options that do not work with their size and body shape.”

Capitalism, still to this day, seeks to relegate women into a specific set of social roles. The inherent motive behind the demonstrated permissibility towards women’s struggles in the workplace comes from centuries of patriarchal social norms. The retention of this familial and social order within the capitalist system, left over from the feudal mode of production and dating back to slave societies, consigns women to a specific role in society: that of the homemaker. The unpaid domestic and reproductive labor of women — which is required to maximize production of their working male partners and to raise the next generation of workers — to deal with the emotional duress of the man from the frustrations of labor, to feed and to keep the home for him to come back to, and for his bloodline to be preserved, is indeed a holdover of this social order.

“However, within this structure of society based on kinship groups the productivity of labor increasingly develops, and with it private property and exchange, differences of wealth, the possibility of utilizing the labor power of others, and hence the basis of class antagonisms: new social elements, which in the course of generations strive to adapt the old social order to the new conditions, until at last their incompatibility brings about a complete upheaval.”

F. Engels, “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.”

In 2016, women made up 9.1% of the workforce in construction trades, which grew to 11% in 2021 despite rampant discriminatory hiring practices. Observing the growth of women in construction trades over this five-year period, taken alongside the aforementioned statistics, proves more the importance of the struggles of women in labor. Capitalism is driving women to seek out more gainful employment, oftentimes via construction and similar trades, which continues to be an incredibly dangerous field for them. 

The only path forward to the safety and survival of women in the workforce is through the collective power of the proletariat. Only such collective action by the working class can further the demands for safer environments; both safety from the hazards of the work itself, and the hazards of male chauvinism. 

In the case of the murder of Amber Czech, the Labor Commission and the Women’s Commission of the American Party of Labor echo the immediate demands of the National Association of Women In Construction:

• Clear, accessible and retaliation-free reporting pathways.
• Mandatory, meaningful training on intervention and violence prevention.
• Zero-tolerance enforcement of harassment, bullying, discrimination and threats.
• Accountability for supervisors and managers who fail to act.
• A cultural reset that rejects the normalization of hostility toward tradeswomen.
• In response to Czech’s death, North America’s Building Trades Unions President Sean McGarvey condemned the violence and called for change.

Categories: American Party of Labor, Discrimination, Labor, Statements, U.S. News, Women