Holding a copy of this year’s AFL-CIO Deaths On the Job Report, an angry federation President Liz Shuler had a blunt message for the nation’s employers.
 
“This report should not have to exist …These pages should be blank,” she said.
 
Shuler joined a large crowd in the U.S. Labor Department’s main auditorium to honor the 5,190 workers killed on the job in 2021, the latest federal data available, which is what the AFL-CIO uses for its annual report.
 
But unlike past years, the crowd was dominated by families of victims who died on the job due to unsafe working conditions.
 
Other grieving family members appeared on video interviews, to talk about how they learned their loved ones died. Even though they knew they were being filmed, many of them broke down.
 
Shuler had to compose herself. Her short speech immediately followed the filmed interviews. She reminded the crowd that behind the dry numbers in the long
report were real people who should still be alive.
 
“These pages should be blank,” she said with emphasis and a catch in her throat. Everyone in the report, “is someone who woke up one day, kissed their children or their partner goodbye and expected to come back – and didn’t.
 
“We have to fight like hell to make sure not one more family goes through this.”
 
The annual report was released in time for Workers Memorial Day on April 28.
 
It included the positive note that since unions, led by the late Tony Mazzocchi, pushed the Occupational Safety and Health Act through Congress just over 50 years ago, calculations show it’s saved at least 688,000 workers’ lives.
 
“But over the years, the progress has become more challenging as employers’ opposition to workers’ rights and protections has grown, and attacks on unions have intensified,” the report said. “Big corporations and many Republicans have launched an aggressive assault on worker
protections. They are attempting to shift the responsibility to provide safe jobs from employers to
individual workers and undermine the core duties of workplace safety agencies.”
 
Despite opposition from the corporate class, the U.S. must stay committed to the goal of eliminating death, disease and injury on the job, the report said.
 
“Employers must meet their responsibilities to protect workers and be held accountable if they put workers in danger,” the report said. “Only then can the promise of safe jobs for all of America’s workers be fulfilled.”
 
The report’s findings highlight the challenges that remain:
 
■ 5,190 workers were killed on the job in the United States in 2021, or one every hour and 40 minutes. The fatality rate rose to 3.6 per 100,000 workers. It was 4 per 100,000 for blacks, the highest rate in 19 years.
■ Employers reported nearly 3.2 million work-related injuries and illnesses, and that figure doesn’t include coronavirus victims. The illness figures also doesn’t count 120,000 workers who died from occupational diseases – everything from black lung to cancer caused by inhalation of toxic fumes, minute particles, or both. Also not counted or inadequately counted: Musculoskeletal (ergonomic) injuries, heat-related illnesses and death and the complete toll from workplace violence, a particular hazard to nurses.
■ The death rate for Latinos topped that for both blacks and whites.
■ On-the-job death rates were highest in Wyoming (10.4 deaths per 100,000 workers, three times the national rate), North Dakota (9 per 100,000), Montana (8 per 100,000), Louisiana (7.7 per 100,000) and New Mexico and Alaska (6.2 per 100,000 workers each). Energy production dominates most of those states. Energy industries had the third-highest death rate among all occupational groups (14.2 deaths per 100,000 workers), trailing only farms, forests and fishing (19.5 per 100,000) and transportation and warehousing (14.5 per 100,000).
■ Construction was the fourth highest death rate for occupational groups (9.4 per 100,000).
■ OSHA remains understaffed, even though it had 145 more job safety inspectors in 2021 than its 755 employed the year before. States that run their own OSHAs had 971 safety inspectors in 2021. Together, those two forces were so small it would take 190 years to inspect every U.S. workplace.
■ When OSHA flags firms for job safety and health violations, the fines – often negotiated down between the agency and employers – are small costs of doing business: An average of $4,534 per serious violation that U.S. inspectors found, and half of that for state OSHA inspections. Only 128 cases of wrongful death on the job have been prosecuted since OSHA began.
 
The report recommended hiring more OSHA inspectors and vastly increasing the fines, among other moves.
 
“In a country with the technology we have, there should not be a need to chronicle thousands of deaths,” Shuler said. “This is not a back-in-the-day problem, it’s a today problem.”