On 6 July this year, a tragic incident happened at a construction site in Kyiv. According to one version of events, a tower crane operator a construction site in the northwest of the city - a young father who loved his profession - took his own life. Apparently, he jumped out of the crane cabin window 16 stories up after discovering his wife had cheated on him.
Commenting on those rumours, his manager said: “He worked for our company for eight years. A normal, reasonable man took his own life. I don’t know why people decide to do this. Whether he had some unpayable debt or something like that, I haven’t heard anything about that. We have a good company: no one had a problem with the man who died. The only thing I know is that the day he died, he rang his family and friends and asked them to forgive him, he said that he’d done irreversible on social media. It’s impossible to fall out of that kind of crane by accident.”
Ukraine’s crane operators trade union is sceptical of this interpretation. “Unscrupulous employers are often ready to deploy the most despicable tactics in order not to lose money. This is why we’re looking at different versions of how the crane operator died: we’re trying to separate the testimony of people who worked with the man who died from rumours and information they’ve heard from representatives of the owners and the subcontractor.”
