Work Safety

Just a quick note:

Last week’s mayhem included a major explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas. The precise death toll has yet to be determined but it will be many times that of the Boston attack. Unfortunately that final toll will include at least eleven emergency workers who rushed to the scene to help. Yet the media focus has already swung away. Work place death is not as headline grabbing, nor as sensational politically, as the much smaller death toll inflicted by terrorists. Who cares about worker safety after all? And an exploding fertilizer plant is not an attack on America unless a terrorist had planted the bomb that lit the place up. If the conflagration is simply a result of incompetent or venal management then, as I asked, who cares?

No one cares.

The last year for which I can find numbers is 2010 during which 4,690 people died at work. Not in the line of duty, so they are not ‘heroes’, but at work. So they are just dumb schmucks. That’s more American deaths than in the entire Iraq war. In one year. It’s also more than the loss of life on 9/11. Think about that. Then think about our response.

In America we have an agency designed to monitor and enforce workplace safety rules. It’s called the Occupational Safety and health Administration (OSHA). It hands out fines for workplace safety violations. It is also in the cross hairs of the US Chamber of Commerce and its Republican Congressional allies who want to defund it aggressively so it cannot enforce any rules. Those rules, after all, cost business lots of money  to observe and put in place. Business, naturally, would like to eliminate OSHA, which many tend to see as an interfering purveyor of unnecessary red tape.

A list of 4,690 dead workers in 2010 alone suggests, to me at least, that OSHA has a lot of work yet to do.

These dead Americans received no honor guard. No eulogies. No dramatic or emotional flag waving at the local ball game. No national day of mourning. No medals. No faux grieving by Washington politicians. No moment of silence. And precious little mention in the media – a media hyper sensitive to anything military, anything war, and anything terrorist. OSHA’s response to all those deaths was to mete out fines averaging about $7,900.

We don’t value our workers much do we?

Perhaps that’s because we are our workers ourselves and confront workplace conditions regularly. We are used to the thought that our bosses will cheat if they can in order to make an extra buck. With bucks so short nowadays who can blame them? Besides all that red tape gets in the way of red blooded American enterprise.

Red tape like the rule that says depots holding large amounts of ammonium nitrate – a potential component of bombs much beloved of terrorists – have to report such holdings to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Except someone in Texas didn’t bother with that rule. Apparently they didn’t bother with many rules. You’re supposed to report any holding of over 400 lbs. That’s the amount needed to make a serious bomb. Our red hot Texas factory held about 270 tons of the stuff. That’s 1,350 times the limit supposed to trigger a report. The only reason DHS knew about the factory’s existence was by watching pictures of it blowing up and laying waste to the surrounding town.

You would think that in a nation deeply militarized and fearful of anything remotely smacking of terrorism that the presence of massive undocumented amounts of explosive material would trigger a response in Washington to tighten the reins on workplace safety abuse. I realize that the explosion down in Texas wasn’t an attack on America, but its illegal stockpile of ammonium nitrate could have been a source of one, or many, such attacks. But, so far, no such response has shown up. It would, after all, imply beefing up government to enforce the rules, and we are all supposed to be cutting government spending.

Less government spending on workplace rules means, I am afraid, more factory accidents and additional deaths for workers and those who rush in to help them.

But who cares? It’s not like they’re heroes or anything. Not like the military or paramilitary.

Nah. They’re just workers.