Just outside the nation’s capital, a new national memorial is being dedicated to honor the 5,000+ workers who lose their lives on the job each year.

The National Workers Memorial will be located on the campus of the National Labor College, just outside Washington, D.C., in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis will join union leaders on Tuesday to break ground on the memorial, which will be completed this September.

William Scheuerman, president of the college, hopes the memorial will raise awareness for the thousands of Americans who die on the job each year.

“We have monuments to everything else, what about the ordinary person, the person who is not a hero, goes to work one day and just doesn’t come home anymore?” Scheuerman said.

The memorial will take the form of a circular brick plaza surrounded by granite benches and brick pavers engraved with the names of fallen workers.

For $125, anyone can purchase a brick for the memorial, which will be engraved with the name and occupation of a worker who died on the job or from work-related injuries.

Design and construction of the memorial will cost about $450,000. Most of the money has come from union donations. One large donation came from Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos, a lawyer who has represented workers injured by exposure to asbestos.

The memorial will “remind us of the work that still remains to be done to make America’s workplaces as safe and healthy as possible,” said Cecil Robert, president of the United Mine Workers.

This new memorial will hopefully raise awareness about common workplace dangers, including mesothelioma related to asbestos exposure on the job. People in many different occupations from teachers to mechanics to miners run the risk of work-related asbestos exposure.

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