[ Today is Workers Memorial Day. Conditions have improved from the
days of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. But not by nearly
enough.]
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AMERICA’S WORKPLACE SAFETY CRISIS  
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Terri Gerstein
April 28, 2023
The American Prospect
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_ Today is Worker's Memorial Day. Conditions have improved from the
days of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. But not by nearly
enough. _

An employee pulls a pallet jack at the Amazon fulfillment center in
Robbinsville Township, New Jersey, August 1, 2017., Julio Cortez/AP
Photo / The American Prospect

 

Three immigrant workers plummeted more than 70 feet
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their deaths while constructing a residential building. A 22-year-old
immigrant was sucked into a dough mixer without a safety guard
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the factory where he worked; a turbine broke his neck and he was
killed on the job, leaving behind his young child.

These stories aren’t from 1900, during the height of rapid
industrialization in the United States. The construction deaths
happened in North Carolina in 2023; the factory worker died in
Brooklyn several years earlier, at a tortilla factory. (I worked at
the New York Attorney General’s Office at the time, and we
prosecuted
[[link removed]] the
factory owner for workers’ compensation and other violations.)

Like many other problems resurfacing today (see: child labor
[[link removed]]),
workplace fatalities and hazards may seem to many like a throwback to
a century ago, a historical problem that we’ve mostly solved. While
the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act) in
1970 has vastly improved workplace safety, too many people are still
sickened, injured, and killed on the job. Very often, these tragedies
are not unavoidable accidents, but rather entirely predictable and
preventable.

Meanwhile, new developments like climate change and gun proliferation
exacerbate already-existing risks, creating more danger for workers
nationwide. We need a new commitment to workplace safety: to stronger
laws, more enforcement funding, and to worker empowerment generally.

April 28 is Workers’ Memorial Day
[[link removed]], a day
to recognize workers [[link removed]] who
were killed or injured, or who have suffered from exposures to hazards
on the job. As one would expect, it’s commemorated in labor
circles—but also by families of victims
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are far too numerous. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
around 100 people are killed at work every week, each one a tragic
story [[link removed]] of its own.
Worse, this number is likely an undercount: It doesn’t include
deaths caused by workplace transmission of COVID, for example, or gig
workers killed on the job.

In addition to fatalities, far too many people are injured on the
job: An average of 27 workers per day
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amputation or hospitalization. And according to the AFL-CIO’s 2023
“Death on the Job
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estimated 120,000 workers died from occupational diseases. These
problems disproportionately affect low-wage workers, immigrants, and
people of color.

Many of the worst offenders are household-name companies. The National
Council for Occupational Safety and Health on Wednesday issued its
annual “Dirty Dozen” report
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some of the nation’s worst violators; for 2023, the list includes
Amazon, FedEx, and Tesla, as well as major players in the railroad,
chemical, airline services, and food processing industries. So where
are regulators?

The OSH Act requires employers to provide workers with a safe
workplace, and it created an agency—the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration (OSHA)—to enforce the law and issue rules
about specific workplace hazards.

You might think that companies would welcome the opportunity to
improve workplace safety: In order to operate, a business needs
workers who are (a) healthy and (b) alive. But you would be wrong.
Business opposition to OSHA has always seemed odd, though; what CEO
wants to go to bed at night or face their children in the morning
knowing they’ve caused workers to be maimed or killed? Nonetheless,
OSHA has faced severe opposition from business since before its
creation [[link removed]], which is
the main reason it is seriously underfunded
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Constant pushback from business has also led to exceedingly long time
spans (seven years on average
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(known as “standards”) on specific workplace dangers.

OSHA has faced severe opposition from business since before its
creation, which is the main reason it is seriously underfunded.

New developments and trends make this baseline situation even worse.

Climate change is already having a devastating impact on workers.
Facing extreme weather events like tornadoes
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hurricanes, workers are sometimes required to stay or threatened with
job loss if they evacuate, with loss of life
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a result. Excessive heat is also killing workers
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a farmworker in Oregon
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a California UPS driver
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just turned 24, a construction worker in Texas
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and another in upstate New York
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who died his second day on the job.

Now, OSHA started a rulemaking on heat in 2021, but it will likely be
years before this rule is finalized and takes effect. That is
especially dispiriting because unlike some complex analysis of how to
manage an unusual toxic substance, the requirements for protecting
workers from the heat are almost embarrassingly basic: rest, shade,
water, and gradual acclimatization to high temperatures. (Any parent
could tell you that.) The good news is that some states aren’t
waiting for OSHA and have passed workplace heat rules of their own
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Our failure to pass commonsense gun laws also affects workers. In
Buffalo, Boulder, El Paso, and countless other cities, supermarket and
retail workers have been killed in gun massacres, and in classrooms
across the country, teachers are literally in the line of fire. Of
course, the real solution is sensible gun restrictions. But workplace
law is nonetheless relevant: Several states, like Washington
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employers in certain industries (those with high risk of violence,
like health care
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late-night retail) to create workplace violence prevention programs.
This isn’t expecting the impossible: It simply requires employers to
anticipate risks and come up with a prevention plan to keep workers as
safe as possible if there are violent incidents. Again, OSHA hasn’t
issued a rule in this area, even though the House has repeatedly
passed a bill
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the subject.

Elsewhere, there is another emergent hazard that could be easily
prevented: punishing workplace quotas reported in Amazon warehouses,
which cause lasting harm to workers’ bodies. Amazon’s injury
record is far worse
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the industry as a whole; in some warehouses, 12 out of 100 workers are
injured annually. The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating
[[link removed]]; Washington
state
[[link removed]] sued
the company (and the company sued back), and New York
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laws to try to stop Amazon’s burning up its workforce with nearly
impossible quotas. These injuries can have lifelong impact, reducing
people’s earnings as well as their ability to work or be physically
active, consequences which themselves can shorten life spans.

Increased use of staffing agencies is also a problem: Temporary
workers [[link removed]] often fall through the cracks
and don’t get trained on workplace hazards, with tragic results. Gig
company workers, like Uber and Lyft drivers, are also especially
vulnerable. A 2022 report
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that over 50 were killed on the job since 2017. The victims’
families were basically on their own afterward—because gig companies
engage in the fiction that workers are running their own businesses,
victims’ spouses and children have been left without even the
limited support of workers’ compensation insurance.

These new trends are occurring amidst everyday dangers that never
stopped happening. We remember the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of
1911, in which 146 workers died because exits were blocked. Today,
Dollar General stores have faced millions of dollars of OSHA
penalties
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the same reason. Construction workers still regularly perish
from falls
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collapses
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(One positive development: District attorneys and criminal prosecutors
are starting to take these cases seriously
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The first step to making workplaces safer is to understand that we
still have a problem, and that new dangers abound. We need to take our
collective heads out of the sand, and realize that the problems of
workplace death, injury, and illness weren’t solved in the early
1900s, or during the New Deal, or when the OSH Act was passed over 50
years ago.

We need stronger state and federal laws that give enforcers more
effective tools and that respond to new workplace hazards; we also
need to adequately fund OSHA so the agency can do its job. State and
local leaders can act, too, passing laws and funding enforcement
within their own jurisdictions. And our outdated labor laws should be
updated
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workers can more easily form unions; they serve as on-site safety
monitors and help keep workers safe.

America’s working people deserve so much more. Everyone should be
able to go to work at the start of the day and return home at the end,
safe and healthy and whole.

_[TERRI GERSTEIN is the director of the State and Local Enforcement
Project at the Harvard Center for Labor and a Just Economy and a
senior fellow at the Economic Policy Institute.]_

Read the original article at Prospect.org
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Used with the permission. © The American Prospect
[[link removed]], Prospect.org, 2023 [[link removed]].
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