12 Workers are Killed Daily on the Job in America

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

It would come as no surprise if you were unaware that April 28 is Workers’ Memorial Day. We do not get the day off work or school. Banks do not close. Government does not shut down. The media do not even mention it.

However, it might come as a surprise that a dozen or so U.S. workers die on the job each day, given the common belief that the country is the wealthiest and greatest in the world. After all, don’t we have modern medicine, safety devices on our machines, effective training and mandatory breaks for those who operate dangerous machinery?

While American workers are responsible for the vast wealth accumulated by the richest CEO’s, bankers and industrialists, their lives and wellbeing are hardly valued at all. They are easily replaced by the millions of unemployed and underemployed. Slowing down production to a safe speed, installing safety features, and properly training employees all cut into profits and are far more expensive than a bouquet and a condolence check.

Working to Live, Not Dying to Work

Legislators routinely mischaracterize safety regulations as “job killers.” However, weak safety regulations are, in reality, people killers. In 1970, the year that the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) was passed, there were more than 14,000 deaths on the job nationally. By 2010, the number of occupational deaths was down to 4,574, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

Despite this progress, there are still too many deaths occurring on the job and job deaths are increasing in some regions. The Sacramento Bee notes that workplace fatalities increased by roughly 25% in Pennsylvania between 2009 and 2010, despite a decline in the number of people actually working. There have also been many notable preventable workplace fatalities recently, like the Deep Water Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, which killed 11 workers, and the Massey Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion, which killed 29 workers.

It is also worth noting that close to 3 million workers are injured or made sick at work each year.

No one should have to die or suffer serious injuries just to put food on the table.

We Want Jobs! (Regardless of Pay and Safety)

As Obama gets ready to give his jobs speech, unemployment remains stagnant at 9.1% officially, according to Democracy Now, with unemployment for African Americans having jumped 1% over the last year to 18%. The rate for African American teens, however, leaped a staggering 7.3% to 46.5%. Meanwhile, the White House budget office is saying that unemployment will not drop below 6% until 2017 (if even then), which should be no surprise at all when it is cutting spending and investing almost nowhere except in warfare.

Obama has been channeling FDR in a desperate attempt to save his presidency: "We’ve got roads and bridges across this country that need rebuilding.” In other words, there is plenty to invest in the petroleum-automotive industrial complex, perpetuation of oil dependency and the generation of more greenhouse gasses, but little or nothing toward green energy.

He also pandered to the dying labor movement (and the flourishing business community), saying “We’ve got more than one million unemployed construction workers ready to get dirty right now. There is work to be done, and there are workers ready to do it. Labor is on board. Business is on board. We just need Congress to get on board. Let’s put America back to work."

Teamsters President James Hoffa told Obama that his people were Obama’s “army” and that they were “ready to march.”

Ready to march for what, and why?

“We want one thing,” Hoffa continued: “Jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs. That’s what we’re going to tell him."

Apparently, jobs are all Hoffa cares about, more than anything else. Jobs at all costs! Any sort of work is good, regardless of pay, working conditions, workplace safety, or benefits. With Obama threatening to “streamline” government regulation and remove “dumb” regulations, many of the new jobs will no doubt be unsafe for workers and the communities where they work.

So, as long as we’re only interested in putting people to work, why not also invade a few more countries and institute a draft? That would put a lot of young people to work. While we’re at it, we could invest in mercenary armies and employ more Americans to help insurgents throughout the Middle East and Africa. We could also put them to work running CIA black sites and secret prisons or helping city police to quash protests or riots by those who have not found work.

We could create a lot of jobs by building more radioactive waste storage facilities and increasing the number of reactors, especially along the Eastern Seaboard and South, where they would be prone to hurricane damage, and along the West Coast, where they would be at risk of earthquake damage, or in river floodplains. It would be a growth industry: each time a disaster hit, we could put more people to work cleaning up the mess.

How about more mountaintop removal and strip mines? More explosions, mine collapses, black lung, and watershed contamination? More coal ash floods? More deep water oil spills? We can put America back to work digging deeper into the ground for more climate-destroying carbon to fuel our insatiable lust for energy.

In all seriousness, though, people who have been unemployed for any length of time are certainly desperate for a steady income and many no doubt are feeling unproductive and desirous of meaningful occupation. However, with unions under attack and wages steadily declining over the past 40 years, simply demanding jobs is not enough. Low wage, dead end jobs merely perpetuate poverty and privation, while jobs that destroy the environment jeopardize our long-term material and physical security and need to be replaced with greener alternatives.

It’s time to consider not only which jobs are worth doing at all, but also whether we are willing to compensate people sufficiently to live decent lives. Work for the sake of work is not worth the trouble. Likewise, it is not worth fighting for jobs that makes people sick or shorten their lives and do not even provide enough for healthcare, vacations, decent food and housing.

Work, A Deadly Disease

Lose Something At Work? (Image by scottypimpin)

Working in These Times recently published a pretty good partial history of workplace safety regulations. Knowing this history is important in the struggle to defend working conditions, as bosses and their lobbyists try to fast-track anti-regulatory legislation.

Obama, in particular, has been singing the praises of deregulation, suggesting that worker protections are merely “red tape” that hampers growth. The data in the article (from Public Citizen) is particularly interesting, as it shows just how significantly workplace safety regulations have reduced workplace fatalities and injuries. You should check out the article, but I’ll present a summary below:

Byssinosis, or “brown lung,” affected thousands of women who worked in poorly ventilated dust-clogged textile mills. It was virtually ignored until the 1960s and 1970s. By 1978, a new  OSHA rule required lung-friendlier machinery. Within a few years the incidence of brown lung fell by 97%.

In the 1980s, bosses sued to block the Lockout/Tagout rule, which would have forced employers to mark potentially hazardous equipment with colored tags and provide safety training for workers. Despite their protestations, the rule passed. As a result, hazardous energy-related fatalities declined by between 30% and 55% in the years following the enactment of the rule, preventing 50,000 injuries and 120 fatalities per year.

Despite opposition from agribusiness and the Reagan administration, OSHA enacted the Grain Handling Facilities Standard, which established environmental controls for dust and gas and required protective gear for workers and led to a 95% decline in explosion-related fatalities for certain facilities. There was also a dramatic reduction in coal mine-related deaths since Congress passed the Mine Safety and Health Act of 1969.

Obama’s Gift to Business—Decreasing Workplace Safety

Obama recently wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal calling for a massive wave of deregulation, supposedly to free up business to create more jobs and make our economy more competitive. Politicians love to claim they are creating jobs, particularly when unemployment is high. But the claim of “job creation” is really just a cover for deregulations, subsidies, bailouts, and other policies that increase profits. Business will hire more people when it is profitable to do so, not necessarily when government gives them a handout, as was seen in the wake of the massive Wall Street bailout and the less massive bailout of Detroit. Indeed, after the auto manufacturers’ were paid off by the government, jobs were cut, in collusion with the UAW.

This week, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced it was halting the implementation of ergonomics regulations. According to OSHA Chief Dr. David Michaels, ergonomic injuries are the leading cause of workplace injury and illness in the U.S. (They comprise 28% of all workplace injuries). The defeated regulation would have required businesses to count ergonomic injuries and was already considered a compromise (weakening tougher ergonomic rules implemented during the Clinton administration). The move effectively kills all ergonomic workplace regulation.

Obama’s deregulation orgy and his self-lubrication for business are not just indications of Obama’s willingness to capitulate to big business, but of the weakness of organized labor. The ruling elite have been growing cockier, and it’s not just because the Republicans took Congress in the last elections. The number of unionized workers has never been lower (see Impending Demise of Unions), and the union bosses seem uninterested in doing anything about it, like organizing new and existing members to take collective job actions. Until labor is willing to rise up and make life painful for the bosses, the bosses will feel emboldened to take more and more from workers, whether it’s workplace safety, pensions, benefits or compensation or even the right to strike.