Die in a car wreck, and you’ll make the local evening news. Die committing a crime, and you’ll make national news. But if you die on the job, in most cases, no one will report on it, and no one outside of your household will ever know you died.
This happens, in almost every instance, because corporate interests do not want these deaths publicized in any way. Attention is often followed by accountability, so the best way to avoid regulations, lawsuits, and common decency is to make sure the deaths are kept quiet, and the victims are kept powerless.
Jordan Barab, former Deputy Assistant Secretary at OSHA explains:
RICK: So why don't we hear those stories? I mean, you do a great job over at jordanbarab.com/confinedspace of compiling these things. You know, why from a worker standpoint aren't we hearing those things to reinforce the message that, you know, maybe that OSHA thing that we don't know what it stands for, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, maybe that kind of is important when someone like Andy Biggs goes, we want to nullify that, we want to do away with it. Or when Republicans say we want to cut their budget, that we reflexively go “No, no … we need that.”
JORDAN: I mean, there are about 100 workers killed in the workplace every week, and I only usually get about 20 of those. And I do I think I do a pretty good media search. So that means there's about 80% of the people killed in the workplace never show up in the newspaper. Nobody ever finds out about it. Nobody knows anything.
So part of it is just, you know, the public awareness. I mean, back in the day before OSHA when everybody was working in manufacturing and there were 10 times as many fatalities in the workplace, everybody knew somebody that had gotten killed in the workplace. Now it's not quite that way.
And it's hard to get the press to cover these issues. I mean there are no labor reporters anymore. Even the press that does cover a lot of these issues don't know how to cover it. They'll say, “There's a guy that was killed in a 13 foot deep trench and we don't know why the trench collapsed.” Well, the trench collapsed because it was too deep and it was in violation of a million OSHA standards. But they don't know that. I spend a lot of time writing to reporters about, how to report better on these things. And the same thing with Congress. One thing I love to have do, it's too much time for me to do, take every one of the deaths that we find in the workplace, take the article and send it to their congressman, so they'll understand that they're actually, their constituents are getting killed because the corporations are taking advantage of them.
Now that OSHA is in the DOGE crosshairs, there are several predictions for the future that are almost certain to come true. First, deaths in the workplace are going to rise, and at the same time, our power to do anything at all about those deaths is going to diminish.
For several years now, we have been sharing an unfortunate truism with our listeners. “Republicans hate working people.” And as blindly partisan as that may sound, it isn’t partisan at all. It’s simply true. And all you have to do to prove that statement is ignore what Trump and the GOP say, and instead look at what they do.
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