Latino workers and older workers face shocking workplace fatality rates
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April 28 is Workers Memorial Day, a day to honor workers killed or injured on the job. There are a lot of them.
In 2020, according to the AFL-CIO’s 2022 Death on the Job report, 4,764 workers were killed at work in the United States, and an estimated 120,000 died from diseases related to their occupations. Nearly 3.2 million work-related illnesses and injuries were reported, despite significant underreporting. The true number is likely between 5.4 million and 8.1 million.
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This year, we at least have a president who observes the day. “Ensuring worker safety is a national priority and a moral imperative,” President Joe Biden tweeted. “On Workers Memorial Day, we honor and remember those who lost their lives on the job and reaffirm every worker’s basic right to a safe and healthy workplace.” Reducing the number of deaths, injuries, and illnesses would take significant investment, though, and we don’t have a Congress that’s going to appropriate the money needed.
At the federal and state levels combined, there are just 1,719 workplace safety inspectors in the United States. That’s one for every 81,427 workers. There are 10.8 million workplaces in the nation. And in addition to the low level of federal investment in protecting workers on the job—the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has just $4.37 per worker—penalties to employers that endanger, injure, or even kill workers are appallingly low. The median federal penalty for a worker’s death was $9,753, and of course median means that half of the penalties were lower. State OSHA penalties for a worker’s death on the job were much lower: a median of just $5,825. For someone’s life.
Workplace dangers aren’t equally distributed. Latino and Black workers face greater risks. While the national average job fatality rate is 3.4 per 100,000 workers, for Black workers it’s 3.5 per 100,000 and for Latino workers it’s 4.5, and rising. Immigrants are particularly at risk: 65% of the Latino workers who died on the job in 2020 were immigrants.
Older workers also face a shocking level of risk, at 8.6 job fatalities per 100,000 workers 65 and older.
Where and in what industry you work also makes a big difference. In 2020, the least safe states to work in were Wyoming (13.0 per 100,000 workers), Alaska (10.7 per 100,000 workers), South Dakota (7.8 per 100,000 workers), North Dakota (7.4 per 100,000 workers), and West Virginia (6.6 per 100,000 workers). The least safe industries were agriculture, forestry, and fishing and hunting (21.5 per 100,000 workers); transportation and warehousing (13.4 per 100,000 workers); mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction (10.5 per 100,000 workers); construction (10.2 per 100,000 workers); and wholesale trade (4.6 per 100,000 workers).
There are some obvious fixes here: Fund workplace safety inspections, and focus them on the groups and industries at particular risk. Increase penalties to a high enough level that they might serve as a deterrent to the kind of scumbag employer who won’t worry about workers’ lives unless it hits them in the bank account. Put into place new policies on things like emergency response, heat illness and injury, combustible dust, musculoskeletal disorders.
And unions. At the Economic Policy Institute, Jennifer Sherer highlights the importance of workplace safety as an issue in the biggest union win in years, at Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse. Christian Smalls was fired after he protested for better COVID-19 safety measures. He went on to organize the historic union at a company that has workplace safety problems predating COVID-19, with serious injury rates in its warehouses coming in at nearly double that of other retail warehouses and more than double that of Walmart.
When workers come together to build power and make changes in the workplace, safety can be a major issue at the bargaining table. It remains to be seen what gains the Amazon union will be able to make—as of now, the company is refusing to even recognize the union—but the fact that this organizing win started with a workplace safety concern shows the power of the reality behind Workers Memorial Day.