Forty years ago this month, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the landmark law designed to protect employees from hazards in the workplace, went into effect. Today, April 28 marks Worker’s Memorial Day, which is set aside to honor workers killed or injured at work.
The public will remember the West Virginia mine disaster that killed 29 miners last year, as well as the Gulf of Mexico oil rig explosion that killed 11 workers. Fourteen workers die on the job each and every day in the United States without headlines or public notice. Another 50,000 workers die each year from occupational diseases, and almost 5 million workers a year suffer work-related injuries.
This year, there are a number of important anniversaries that remind us of the profound connection between work and health, including the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which 146 New York City workers, mostly young immigrant women, perished because they were locked in the factory. Today, immigrant workers work in the most hazardous jobs and suffer high rates of injuries and disease.
In 1968, a mine explosion near Farmington, W.Va., killed 78 miners. The disaster was a catalyst for a federal coal mine safety law as well as the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and its sister agency, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
The past four decades of work by OSHA and NIOSH to improve workplace safety clearly demonstrates two facts: First, hundreds of thousands of workers’ lives — estimates say as many as 410,000 — have been saved because OSHA exists. Second, today’s OSHA is not adequate for present and future challenges. Because of their limited numbers, agency inspectors are not able to visit workplaces often enough. Enforcement fines are too small to serve as a deterrent and criminal penalties are almost nonexistent. We regulate only a small fraction of workplace chemicals and conditions based on antiquated science.
NIOSH, tasked with providing a scientific basis for regulations and conducting research to improve health and safety, is under attack. President Barack Obama’s fiscal year 2012 budget proposal, released in February, would zero out funding for NIOSH Education and Resource Centers, which provide occupational health and safety training, as well as the Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing Program, which addresses safety in those high-fatality industries. If these programs are not rescued, the field will be set back decades.
We must make our factories, offices and other workplaces safe. This requires protecting the rights of workers to organize and bargain collectively. It demands restoring and increasing the funding to NIOSH to train health and safety professionals, and modernizing OSHA. We must invest in safe workplaces by revamping and strengthening the Occupational Safety and Health Act. If we fail, tens of thousands of workers will continue to die because of their jobs.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
