On November 11, 2025, 20-year-old welder Amber Czech walked into her workplace, and she never walked out. She was murdered during her shift, in plain sight, inside an environment that promised safety. Her life was taken in a place where she had every right to expect protection.
Amber’s death has sent shockwaves across industries, from the trades and unions to mine sites, boardrooms, and global safety networks. The reaction has been deeply felt, marked by one painful truth: many workers did not see her death as an exception. They saw it as familiar.
Engineering News-Record captured the urgency clearly, describing her killing as
“an urgent call to better protect women at worksites.”
National Association of Women in Construction (NAWIC) President Rita Brown stated:
“We must confront the truth that too many tradeswomen have endured hostility, intimidation, harassment and threats on jobsites where warning signs were visible but unaddressed.”
She added that “this tragedy is not an anomaly. It is part of a disturbing pattern that we, as an industry, can no longer deny and will no longer tolerate.”
The Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) went further in their public statement, naming the industry’s responsibility directly:
“When a young tradeswoman’s future is so violently crushed… we must do much, much more.”
“We owe it to her name, to her honor and to all of us to act.”
Tradeswomen across the United States expressed the deepest truth of all. As 19th News reported, many said:
“It could have happened to any of us.”
Amber’s murder has reopened wounds that have never truly healed for tradeswomen and women across mining, natural resources in male-populated high-risk industries.
I personally felt the weight of that truth only days ago.
I was attending a roundtable on mental health and psychological safety, a gathering meant to explore the realities of today’s workforce and the psychosocial pressures people are carrying, especially within the context of the Call to Action 92 from Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
In the middle of the discussion, a young tradeswoman attempted to speak Amber’s name. She didn’t make it through the sentence before she broke down in tears. Her grief and anger were unfiltered, and the room, filled with many women and men, nodded in full recognition. We all felt the same truth.
Yes, that could be one of us.
When you have been bullied, harassed, minimized, or threatened even once, you begin scanning for danger everywhere you go. You recognize the signs before anyone else does, and you live with them long after others have moved on.
This is why the global reaction to Amber’s death has not been passive awareness. It has been collective grief, fear, and recognition. Thousands of women in the trades have shared vulnerably on social media what many have held inside for far too long.
Amber’s murder is not a headline. It is evidence.
Evidence of what happens when prevention is optional, when a workplace culture becomes permissive and evidence of what happens when leadership assumes, “It won’t happen here.”
Her story is another painful warning and one we can no longer turn away from.
The real question we must ask ourselves is this: what are we avoiding within our own leadership, our own systems, and our own courage that prevents us from making prevention a collective, non-negotiable responsibility?
Until prevention is regulated, enforced, and tied directly to an organization’s license to operate, we will continue repeating the same failures that cost lives.
The Truth We Can No Longer Avoid
Workplace harassment and violence do not erupt out of nowhere. They escalate, accumulate, and grow inside environments where silence is normalized, reporting is distrusted, fear is familiar, and disrespect is rationalized as “just the culture.”
We know what leads to harm and how behaviour escalates. We know what environments enable violence and there are measures that can be put in place to stop it.
Which brings us to the foundation of everything that must change. PREVENTION.
If we look at what prevention means; Prevention is the deliberate, systematic act of identifying risks before they escalate, interrupting the conditions that allow harm to develop, and putting structures in place that protect people from foreseeable physical, psychological, and emotional danger.
Prevention is not reaction or awareness. It is not a response after damage is done.
Prevention is the upfront work, governance, behaviours, systems, culture, and environmental design that ensures harm never has the opportunity to grow.
Prevention requires:
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- • Recognizing early indicators and not waiting for a crisis.
- • Treating harassment and violence as hazards and not interpersonal conflicts.
- • Building structures that make escalation impossible and not hoping behaviour will self-correct.
- • Embedding accountability the moment risks surface.
- • Designing environments that protect and not assuming people will protect themselves.
Prevention requires leadership to know and implement systems that govern behaviours with high accountability and a zero-tolerance policy. Period!
The prevention system is not a poster, a toolbox talk, or a one-off training. Prevention is a system that interrupts escalation, governed by policy, standards, accountability, and the leadership required to make it a real lived experience for every human being in the organization, including leadership themselves.
What Prevention Means
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- ✔ Making psychological safety a non-negotiable operational standard, not a wellness tagline.
- ✔ Redesigning male-dominated environments so women are not navigating risk alone.
- ✔ Treating harassment as a hazard, not a behaviour issue.
- ✔ Building governance that enforces consequences consistently, not selectively.
- ✔ Creating reporting systems people trust, not systems that protect reputations.
- ✔ Training leaders to recognize escalation pathways, not hoping they figure it out.
- ✔ Embedding accountability into leadership behaviour, not waiting for the next incident.
When we do this, we stop violence long before it becomes violence. We work to ensure that Amber’s murder, and the thousands before her, never happen again.
We do not need another report to confirm the risks that live within our organizations.
What we need is coordinated, systemic prevention built into design, leadership, culture, and governance across every mine site, construction site, camp, workshop, and every male-populated environment where risk is highest and visibility is lowest.
Prevention science, occupational safety law, and organizational psychology prove that workplace violence is a predictable hazard and that prevention measures are required.
Violence follows a known escalation pathway
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- • harrassment
- • intimidation
- • disrespect
- • boundary testing
- • isolation
- • hostility
- • retaliation
- • threats
- • physical aggression
Every incident has identifiable precursors. Always.
Investigations repeatedly show that if warning signs existed, prevention was possible.
-
- • warning signs were observed
- • behaviour was dismissed
- • grievances were ignored
- • culture normalized disrespect
- • reporting systems failed
- • leaders were unaware, unavailable, or untrained
Global Safety Standards
Global safety standards classify harassment and violence as preventable hazards.
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- • ISO 45003
- • Canada’s Workplace Harassment and Violence Prevention Regulations
- • Australia’s Respect at Work
- • United States OSHA Violence Prevention Guidelines
Harassment, aggression, and violence are hazards requiring:
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- • identification
- • assessment
- • control
- • elimination
- • monitoring
Duty of care requires prevention, not post-incident response.
Why violence emerges
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- • access was possible
- • barriers were absent
- • early behaviours escalated unchecked
- • culture tolerated harm
- • reporting was distrusted
- • consequences were inconsistent
- • leadership was unprepared
Change the environment and the risk collapses. That is prevention.
This Is the Truth We Can No Longer Avoid
Workplace violence and harassment can be prevented because workplace violence follows known pathways, has recognizable precursors, is classified as a preventable hazard in international safety standards, and occurs only when systems fail to intervene early.
Amber’s story makes this impossible to ignore. Her death is the evidence, and her name is the call.
Calling ourselves into action is everyone’s responsibility. This cannot rest on HR leaders. This is each of us. Workplace harassment and violence can happen to anyone. Humans hurting humans. It is our responsibility to safeguard against what can be prevented and to ask ourselves if we would want to receive a call that our child, spouse, sibling, or loved one was murdered at work.
It is acceptable if you do not yet know how to prevent this. What is not acceptable is choosing not to learn. Educate yourself. Read the law. Review your policies. Ask for prevention training. Rewrite your speak up processes. Put every process, standard, and training in place to create a prevention culture, not a reactive one.
Lives are at stake, and we do not need another murder to act.
Because prevention is not complicated or mysterious, and it is not out of reach.
Prevention is a choice. Amber deserved that choice. We all do.
Why Harassment Training Often Fails
Too many harassment programs focus on legal definitions and compliance modules that employees click through but never internalize. Policies may exist, but if they aren’t actionable, accessible, and enforced consistently, employees remain unsure of how to respond, and leaders are inconsistent in how they act. Bystanders, often the first to witness inappropriate behavior, are rarely equipped with the tools to intervene safely and effectively. The result: harassment goes unreported, trust erodes, psychosocial risks escalate, and cultures of silence protect harmful behaviors.
TeamsynerG’s training moves harassment prevention from a compliance requirement to a measurable, accountable practice, creating workplaces where zero tolerance is more than a policy, it’s a lived reality supported by empowered employees and accountable leaders.
Our Distinct Approach: Policy, Practice, and Empowerment
At TeamsynerG, we combine clear, actionable policies with behavior-based training and bystander empowerment to ensure harassment prevention is not theoretical, it’s lived daily.
Our program is rooted in Whole Person Safety®, addressing occupational, psychological, and psychosocial protection to safeguard both dignity and accountability.
Participants don’t just learn what harassment is; they gain practical tools to:
- ✔ Recognize harassment in all its forms.
- ✔ Intervene as empowered bystanders with confidence and safety.
- ✔ Report incidents through trusted, accessible channels.
- ✔ Understand how leadership accountability makes zero tolerance credible.
