America doesn't think much about blue-collar workers. Indeed, politicians praise them and solicit votes. But the true measure of the state's commitment to those who work in factories, mines and warehouses – the legal protections against illness, injury and death – shows that we truly don't care.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently announced that 5,486 workers died on the job in 2022, an increase of nearly 6 percent from 2021. Employers reported 2.8 million non-fatal workplace injuries and illnesses in 2022, an increase of 7.5, according to the BLS. Percentage from previous year. This is almost certainly an underestimate, given that many work-related health conditions go unreported.
Since its founding in 1970, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has paradoxically been accused of being a business killer and under-resourced. The agency spent $3.99 per worker in fiscal year 2022, according to the AFL. CIO. This is less than Starbucks' Venti His Latte.
Additionally, there are only 1,871 federal and state inspectors policing 10.8 million workplaces in this country, which is one inspector for every 77,334 workers, or one inspector visiting each workplace once every 190 years. The amount is sufficient. This does not represent a serious commitment to employee health.
As a journalist who has written about occupational health and safety for decades and recently published a book, these statistics are of interest to me. Cancer Factory: Industrial Chemicals, Corporate Deception, and the Hidden Deaths of American Workers, commemorating one of the most egregious examples of worker neglect since World War II. In this little-known episode, a chemical manufacturing plant in Niagara Falls, New York, owned by the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, produced a pungent yellowish compound called ortho-toluidine in 1957 to make an antioxidant for tires. I started using the liquid. Chemicals from DuPont and other suppliers.
By the mid-1950s, DuPont recognized that ortho-toluidine caused bladder cancer in laboratory animals and zealously protected its manufacturing employees from exposure. However, it was not until the late 1970s that DuPont informed Goodyear of this potential human carcinogen, and even after receiving a belated warning from DuPont, Goodyear continued to protect its employees. It was late.
The process of restricting or banning chemicals is excruciatingly slow and subject to political whims.
A predictable outcome is the prevalence of bladder cancer. Bladder cancer is an unrelenting, evil disease that can seem to go away but resurface years later. The final tally was that 78 people were infected from this factory, four times the number expected in the general population. Other incidents are probably not recorded.
Additionally, the Goodyear plant used vinyl chloride, a known carcinogen, to manufacture polyvinyl chloride resin, a precursor to PVC plastic, from 1946 to 1996, resulting in excessive liver cancer. did. It was truly a cancer factory.
OSHA is hopelessly behind in managing chemicals. Many of its exposure limits are decades old and do not reflect current science. Most of the tens of thousands of chemicals distributed globally have not been assigned OSHA limits or analyzed for toxicity.
The Environmental Protection Agency is evaluating and considering additional regulations for some chemicals, including vinyl chloride, that are present in Americans' homes, ambient air, and workplaces. But the process of restricting or banning chemicals is excruciatingly slow and subject to political whims.
No reasonable person would say that American workplaces are any more bleak today than they were in the late 1960s, before Congress passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act at the urging of President Richard Nixon. In my research for my book, I skimmed through countless documents from not-so-distant times and was struck by how barbaric the environment was.
Approximately 14,500 workers died on the job each year, and millions more were injured or sickened. On February 1, 1968, two days after the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive, Willard Wirtz, Secretary of Labor in the Lyndon Johnson administration, held a series of Congressional hearings to discuss American workplace massacres and bloodshed in Southeast Asia. compared. “This morning's newspaper reported the casualty list from Vietnam,” Wirtz testified, and there was a “casualty list that repeats every weekday throughout the year in this country.” Still, he said, “it was almost impossible to recognize that this problem had been underestimated for many years.”
With some narrow exceptions, states were responsible for regulating workplace health and safety. I almost didn't try it. The highly industrialized state of Ohio had 109 wildlife inspectors and her 79 workplace inspectors. Mississippi didn't have a labor department and he had two safety inspectors.
When President Nixon signed the Occupational Safety and Health Act into law on December 29, 1970, he called it “probably the best thing ever passed by Congress in terms of the 55 million people covered by this law.'' “It's one of the most important bills ever.” American. ” OSHA, the government agency created that day, especially under the Carter administration and under the leadership of Eula Bingham, cracked down on toxic substances such as benzene, lead, and cotton dust, making a difference in the lives of workers.
But OSHA was destroyed under President Ronald Reagan and never fully recovered. Meanwhile, the number of union members declined rapidly. According to the BLS, in 1983, the American membership rate was 20.1%. In 2022, it was 10.1%.The rough-and-tumble Petroleum, Chemical, and Nuclear Workers International Union represented Goodyear employees in Niagara Falls and called for a government investigation into the Niagara Falls bladder cancer outbreak., No more. Tony Mazzocchi, a firefighter who was a leader in OCAW and an eloquent advocate for the health and safety of its members, passed away in 2002.
Today, we are left with a haphazard system of worker protections. Some companies (perhaps most) take their legal responsibility to provide a safe place of employment seriously, while others simply don't care. Migrant workers often find themselves in the worst situations.
Today, we are left with a haphazard system of worker protections. Migrant workers often find themselves in the worst situations.
In my book and in reporting for Public Health Watch, the nonprofit news organization I run, I have documented the prevalence of silicosis, an ancient lung disease, among workers who cut and grind engineered stone countertops. Two outbreaks were experienced. They have little or no respiratory protection and will breathe in ultra-fine silica particles that will eventually suffocate if not removed from exposure. The first cluster was identified in Northern California in 2019, and the second in Southern California in 2022.
In each case, the victims were relatively young Latino men who were happy with regular jobs that paid $14 an hour. As of December, there were 100 confirmed cases of silicosis in California, and the number is likely to rise.
To its credit, the state of California has passed an emergency rule that increases inspections of engineered stone shops and requires shop owners to take protective measures, such as suppressing silica dust with water. However, it has its own workplace regulatory agency known as Cal/OSHA. About half of the states do not rely on federal OSHA and must do so. OSHA has begun efforts to enforce silica, but its scope is so narrow that it is unlikely to have a significant impact on the problem.
And many more countertop workers will die. When I interviewed seriously ill Juan Gonzalez in the San Fernando Valley in October 2022, six months before his death at the age of 37, I asked him what message he had for consumers. “Many of us continue to work in this field out of necessity, but many continue out of ignorance, not knowing what causes the damage: stones,” he said in Spanish. Ta. “Behind the kitchen is basically sweat and blood and, in the worst case scenario, even death.”
We have entered the third decade of the 21st century. The disease that struck Gonzalez had been killing miners and stone cutters in Greece and Rome 2,000 years earlier. We can do better.
