The job fatality rate isn't budging, and no wonder, with penalties this low

by Laura Clawson

  

When we think about workplace fatalities, it's natural that we think about cases like the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, which at this writing had caused more than 1000 fatalities. In the United States, we think about the West Fertilizer Co. explosion, which killed 14, including 10 firefighters. Or the Upper Big Branch Mine explosion. We think about disasters with fatalities in the double digits and dramatic visuals, in other words. And we do notice those stories. Many deaths on the job, though, are virtually ignored outside the circle of people directly affected. They happen in ones and twos, quietly, and the hazards or negligence or outright disdain for the lives of workers that cause them are punished only with fines, usually bargained down to shockingly low levels. The AFL-CIO released its Death on the Job report this week, and the toll for the United States in 2011 was 4,693 workers killed on the job, an average of 13 every day. It's much harder to know how many died from occupational diseases, but the estimate is 50,000. Everyone's risk is not equal, with states having fatality rates ranging from 1.2 per 100,000 in New Hampshire to 12.4 per 100,000 in North Dakota, differences due partly to the mix of industries in those states; workers in agriculture or mining are at much more risk than workers in finance or education, obviously.
One category of workers at high risk stands out. Where the overall job fatality rate is 3.5 for every 100,000 workers:

Latino workers continue to be at increased risk of job fatalities, with a fatality rate of 4.0 per 100,000 workers in 2011. There were 749 fatal injuries among Latino workers, up from 707 in 2010. Sixty-eight percent of these fatalities (512 deaths) were among workers born outside the United States. Workers who are undocumented may be at particular risk facing abuse and exploitation and fearing retaliation if they raise concerns about unsafe working conditions.

Job fatality rates declined for years, but have been stalled for the past three years. Of course it's harder to reduce relatively low rates, but, as we'll discuss below the fold, the enforcement of workplace safety laws and the incentives for employers to do the right thing are weak.

For one thing, there aren't enough inspectors to check out workplaces on a regular—hell, even on an occasional—basis.

For another thing, the penalties for violations are low enough to be seen by unscrupulous or careless business owners as a cost of doing business. A serious violation of the Occupational Safety and Health Act drew an average penalty of $2,156 in 2012, and that's for states where the federal government is doing the enforcing. States that have their own OSHA plans give an average $974 penalty for a serious violation. Penalties are higher but still totally inadequate even when a worker dies:

For FY 2012, the median initial total penalty in fatality cases investigated by federal OSHA was $6,625 ...

Bad, right? Just $6,625 when someone died? It gets worse: After settlement, the median penalty was down to $5,175. And again, that's when the federal government is in charge. OSHA state plans have an initial median penalty of a paltry $4,900, which is knocked down to $4,200 by settlements. Criminal penalties? Forget about it:

They are limited to cases in which a willful violation results in a worker death and are misdemeanors. Since 1970, only 84 cases have been prosecuted, with defendants serving a total of 89 months in jail. During this time there were more than 390,000 worker deaths. By comparison, in FY 2012 there were 320 criminal enforcement cases initiated under federal environmental laws and 231 defendants charged, resulting in 79 years of jail time and $44 million in penalties—more cases, fines and jail time in one year than during OSHA’s entire history.

It's a slight overstatement to say that the government is basically giving employers free rein to kill workers. But it's not the outrageous hyperbole it should be in any kind of civilized society. Here's what some of those deaths look like. Grain smothering killed 26 in 2010:

“It created kind of a quicksand effect,” Piper said. “So we worked around it and we were aware of it, and after a while … Wyatt ended up getting caught up in it and started screaming for help. Me and Alex went in after him, and we each grabbed one side of him under his armpits and started dragging him out, and got pretty close to the edge of the quicksand and then we started sinking in with him.” [...]
“And it was just me and Alex standing there up to our chests completely, just trapped in the corn,” Piper said. “And Wyatt was underneath. I was hopeful that he was still alive, but at this point I’m pretty sure that he suffocated pretty quickly. The pressure underneath the corn was just too great.” [...] The corn kept flowing around Piper and Pacas. “After a little bit [Pacas’s] hand was sticking up above the grain and I could just see his scalp, and his hand stopped moving,” Piper said. “And the corn was up to my chin at that point. And it was slowly trickling down … and I was about to be covered, too.”

These deaths, like so many others on the job, are horrific and preventable, yet employers tell workers to take the risks, and don't suffer real consequences for the deaths.