Behind the Headlines: The Workplace Kills 14 Per Day—One by OneIt’s been a very bad couple of months for worker safety: Seven dead in Anacortes, Washington, following the explosion of the Tesoro refinery. Six dead in Middletown, Connecticut, in the Kleen Energy power plant explosion. Twenty-nine dead in West Virginia’s Upper Big Branch mine disaster. And 11 dead in the Gulf of Mexico oil rig collapse (a fact almost completely overlooked in media coverage of the spill’s environmental consequences).
But behind the headlines on the latest disaster is a far quieter but equally disturbing story of daily carnage. In the same week as the human-created disaster in the Massey mine in West Virginia, local media outlets around the country carried dozens of stories with headlines like “Man Killed in Trench Collapse” or “Fall from Roof Fatal.”
The toll of these routine incidents—14 deaths a day from injuries alone—is obscured because most occur one death at a time.Month after month, year after year, workers die in trench collapses and falls from roofs.
OSHA cites the employer, slaps it with a modest fine (a median penalty of only $3,675 per death in 2007), and points out that simple methods exist to prevent such tragic loss of life. Yet some employers continue to ignore the hazards and workers continue to lose their lives due to this criminal neglect.Like the high-profile workplace disasters, the vast majority of deaths on the job are entirely preventable.
The problem is not a technical one of chemical concentrations, safe machinery, and ventilation, but a political one—simply put, our national system for enforcing health and safety regulations in the workplace is broken.snip
WHY NO ENFORCEMENT
First, it’s a problem of resources:
OSHA’s budget for enforcement is pitifully inadequate, a situation that has worsened since deregulation began in the Reagan era. In the late 1970s, OSHA had one inspector per 30,000 covered workers; today it’s one per 60,000.
Second,
obstacles to any new workplace safety rules, put in place by deregulation ideologues in Congress, have effectively brought the OSHA regulatory process to a complete standstill. As the Center for Progressive Reform puts it, “In the nearly 40 years since its enactment, the OSHA Act has been exposed as a virtually useless tool for establishing occupational health and safety standards.” In the last 13 years, OSHA has issued exactly one new health standard establishing the maximum safe exposure to a chemical, and that under the duress of a court order.
Third,
OSHA’s promise that all workers have the right to speak up about unsafe or unhealthy conditions without retaliation has proven to be a cruel joke to those who have risked their jobs by calling OSHA.
The agency’s whistleblower protection program is so ineffective that worker advocates cannot in good conscience advise a non-union worker to file an OSHA complaint if he or she wants to keep the job.snip
http://www.labornotes.org/2010/06/behind-headlines-workplace-kills-14-day-one-one
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