Report: Death On The Job; The Toll Of Neglect

This 2024 edition of “Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect” marks the 33rd year the AFL-CIO has produced a report on the state of safety and health protections for America’s workers. The Occupational Safety and Health Act, promising every worker the right to a safe job, has been in effect for more than 50 years, and nearly 690,000 workers now can say their lives have been saved since the passage of the OSH Act. 

Over the last 50 years, there has been significant progress toward improving working conditions and protecting workers from job injuries, illnesses and deaths. Federal job safety agencies have issued many important regulations on safety hazards and health hazards like silica and coal dust, strengthened enforcement and expanded worker rights. These initiatives undoubtedly have made workplaces safer and saved lives, but much more progress is needed. 

Over the years, progress has become more challenging, as employers’ opposition to workers’ rights and protections has grown, and attacks on unions have intensified. Big corporations and many Republicans have launched an aggressive assault on worker protections. They have used their power and influence to attempt to deregulate the work environment, shift the responsibility to provide safe jobs from employers to individual workers, and undermine the core duties of job safety and health agencies. The unnecessary political polarization of critical issues like climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic have exacerbated and introduced new challenges to longstanding problems of heat and infectious diseases exposures in the workplace, but these real threats from existing and emerging hazards need to be addressed under the duties of the OSH Act. Other real, everyday threats like workplace violence and job fatality rates for workers of color are only getting worse.

But our job safety agencies have been flat-funded for years, not even keeping up with inflation. Meanwhile, these agencies’ responsibilities have grown with increasing employment and emerging hazards. There needs to be a renewed focus and commitment to these agencies from both lawmakers and the public. 

The Biden and Trump administration’s records on worker safety and health differ drastically. The Biden administration’s job safety agencies have had to repair and rebuild after four years of decimation rife with understaffing, repeal of worker safety laws, limits on public access to information and the inability to issue even the most basic of long-overdue protections. Instead, the Biden administration has improved transparency of information about loved ones lost on the job to honor them and to prevent these tragedies for other families, bolstered enforcement initiatives to hold accountable the employers who violate the law and put workers in danger, strengthened policies to protect vulnerable workers with the greatest risks of dying on the job and facing retaliation, and issued milestone regulations to save workers’ lives and improve their livelihoods.

Just recently, the Biden administration used the first action under the amended Toxic Substances Control Act to ban current uses and imports of chrysotile asbestos, after decades of weak laws and inaction that have put the United States behind other countries; issued a rule to protect communities from facilities that store, use or manufacture chemicals; clarified the rights of workers to choose their own representation during inspections; issued a rule to protect mineworkers from silica exposure; issued a rule to require large employers to fall in line with other-sized employers on injury reporting to OSHA and anti-retaliation measures for workers who report injuries; and worked across agencies to protect immigrant workers whose employers are involved in a workplace safety and health investigation. 

The nation must remain committed to protecting workers from job injury, disease and death and to ensure Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) investigations have access to all of the relevant facts and witnesses that often are blocked by employers. We must prioritize preventing injury, illness and death at work in order to restore dignity and justice to working people, improve livelihoods, and reduce burdens on families and communities. Employers must meet their responsibilities under the law to protect workers and be held accountable if they put workers in danger. Only then can we fulfill the promise of good jobs to include a safe and healthy job for all of America’s workers. There is much more work to be done to ensure the fundamental right to a safe job is a reality for all.

The High Toll of Job Injuries, Illnesses and Deaths

In 2022:

• 344 workers died each day from hazardous working conditions.
• 5,486 workers were killed on the job in the United States.
• An estimated 120,000 workers died from occupational diseases.
• The job fatality rate increased again to 3.7 per 100,000 workers. 
• Workers of color die on the job at a higher rate: Black and Latino worker job fatality rates are disproportionate compared with all other workers and are continuing to increase. 
• Employers reported nearly 3.5 million work-related injuries and illnesses, an increase from the previous year.
• 43 workers died from heat on the job; fatal and nonfatal data are an undercount of the real problem.
• Workplace homicides and workplace suicides increased 9% and 13%, respectively, from 2021 to 2022.
• Separately, unintentional overdoses at work increased 13% from 2021 to 2022. 
• The rate of serious workplace violence injuries has increased to 4.3 per 10,000 workers.
• Musculoskeletal disorders from repetitive motion injuries continue to be a major problem, accounting for 28% of all serious work-related injuries and illnesses in private industry.
• Underreporting of all workplace injuries and illnesses is widespread—the true toll of work-related injuries and illnesses is 5.6 million to 8.4 million each year in private industry. 
• Chemical exposures continue to plague working people, leading to debilitating, life-threatening diseases that are totally preventable.

The cost of job injuries and illnesses is enormous, estimated at $174 billion to $348 billion a year—an undercount of the real impact on society, families and communities. 

States with the highest fatality rates in 2022 were:

• Wyoming (12.7 per 100,000 workers)
• North Dakota (9.8 per 100,000 workers)
• Mississippi (6.9 per 100,000 workers)
• New Mexico (6.8 per 100,000 workers)
• West Virginia (6.8 per 100,000 workers)
• Louisiana (6.4 per 100,000 workers)

Industries with the highest fatality rates in 2022 were:

• Agriculture, forestry, and fishing and hunting (18.6 per 100,000 workers)
• Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction (16.6 per 100,000 workers)
• Transportation and warehousing (14.1 per 100,000 workers)
• Construction (9.6 per 100,000 workers)
• Wholesale trade (5.4 per 100,000 workers)

Black and Latino workers are more likely to die on the job. In 2022:

• Black workers’ job fatality rate was the highest it has been in nearly 15 years—4.2 per 100,000 workers. 
• 734 Black workers died on the job—the highest number in at least 20 years.
• Latino workers’ job fatality rate increased again to 4.6 per 100,000 workers—meaning they continued to face the greatest risk of dying on the job than all workers at 24% higher than the national average; the rate marked a 24% increase over the past decade.
• The number of Latino worker deaths increased again to 1,248. Of those killed on the job, 60% were immigrants.

Older workers and minors are at serious risk. In 2022:

• More than one-third of workplace fatalities occurred among workers ages 55 and older. 
• Workers 65 and older have 2.4 times the risk of dying on the job as other workers, with a job fatality rate of 8.8 per 100,000 workers.
• Many older workers are injured from falls on the same level.
• Many children, mostly migrants, have become the focus of stark exploitation, working in dangerous conditions. 
• 19 workers younger than 18 years and 400 workers between 19 and 25 years old died on the job. 

Job Safety Oversight and Enforcement

The Biden administration has stepped up enforcement through several targeted enforcement initiatives: 

• OSHA has clarified the importance of the participation of all workers to choose their representatives during OSHA inspections.
• OSHA has reinstated the collection of employer injury data for large employers to better inform inspection and prevention measures.
• OSHA has instituted instance-by-instance citations for high-gravity violations, maximizing the penalty for employers who violate the law.
• OSHA has signed a joint agreement with the National Labor Relations Board to strengthen information-sharing for whistleblower cases. 
• OSHA has instituted targeted enforcement programs and awareness campaigns on heat, silica, COVID-19, falls in construction, combustible dust, injuries in the poultry industry and warehousing.  
• The Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) has reinstated impact inspections, focusing on mines with a poor history of compliance with MSHA standards, high numbers of injuries, illnesses or fatalities, or other indicators of unsafe mines.

OSHA resources in FY 2023 still are too few to be a deterrent:

• There are 1,875 inspectors (853 federal and 1,022 state) to inspect the 11.5 million workplaces under the Occupational Safety and Health Act’s jurisdiction. 
• Federal OSHA has 47 fewer inspectors than in FY 2022— only enough to inspect workplaces once every 186 years—and state OSHA plans have 51 additional inspectors compared with FY 2022.
• There is one inspector for every 80,014 workers.
• The current OSHA budget amounts to $3.93 available to protect each worker. 

Penalties in FY 2023 still are too weak:

• The average penalty for a serious violation was $4,597 for federal OSHA.
• The average penalty for a serious violation was $2,406 for OSHA state plans. 
• The median penalty for killing a worker was $14,063 for federal OSHA.
• The median penalty for killing a worker was $7,000 for state OSHA plans.
• Only 137 worker death cases have been criminally prosecuted under the Occupational Safety and Health Act since 1970.

Much Work Remains to Be Done

Workers need more job safety and health protection, not less. 

Action needed from job safety agencies:

• Fully enforce OSHA, MSHA and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) job safety and health protections to hold employers accountable for not following workplace safety and health laws.
• Strengthen federal OSHA oversight of state OSHA plans.
• Increase attention to the significant safety and health problems faced by Latino, Black, immigrant and aging workers, and those under nontraditional work arrangements. 
• Strengthen anti-retaliation protections and worker participation rights.
• Issue an OSHA workplace violence standard for health care and social service workers.
• Issue an OSHA heat illness and injury prevention standard to protect indoor and outdoor workers from dangerously hot working conditions.
• Issue an OSHA infectious disease standard to protect workers from growing biological threats.

Action needed from Congress:

• Increase funding and staffing at job safety agencies for both standard-setting and enforcement, modernizing the flat-funded budget that has prevented agencies from fulfilling their obligations. 
• Pass legislation on heat and workplace violence to ensure OSHA develops and issues strong standards on these major problems.
• Pass the Protecting America’s Workers Act to extend the Occupational Safety and Health Act’s coverage to workers currently excluded, strengthen civil and criminal penalties for violations, enhance anti-discrimination protections, and strengthen the rights of workers, unions and those who have been injured or made ill because of their jobs.
• Oppose attempts by corporations to weaken protections under the guise of regulatory “reform” that actually would make it more difficult—or impossible—for agencies to issue needed safeguards.

Action needed to restore and improve injury and illness data:

• Enhance access to timely injury and illness information by providing the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) with additional resources to publish annual detailed nonfatal injury and illnesses data.
• Improve and restore the collection and reporting of demographic, cause, nature and other descriptive data for workers killed on the job through agreements and policies that allow BLS to publish more comprehensive and descriptive worker fatality data. 
• Refocus and align data collection and analysis efforts with emerging worker safety and health issues, and with an equitable lens needed to support the tracking and understanding of these key areas.
• Develop a national occupational disease surveillance system to determine and illuminate the true toll of occupational illnesses from workplace exposures, and inform prevention efforts to reduce chronic illnesses.

Workers need to be able to fully exercise their rights to a workplace free from recognized hazards, including the ability to report injuries and illnesses without retaliation, raise unsafe working conditions, be able to fully utilize stop work authority, come home unharmed at the end of the workday and be fully compensated when the job has injured or made them ill. 

This requires refocused national attention, energy and action on the enormous role and impact job safety and health agencies play to provide workplace oversight and prevent the disease, injuries and death that plague working people across the country. There must be new dedication and leadership to substantially increase their resources to protect workers, and address ongoing and emerging safety and health problems. Employers and elected leaders must recognize that employment is a significant determinant of health and take leadership to make workplaces safer. 

Congress continues to fund job safety at stagnant levels, allowing an OSHA budget that still only amounts to $3.93 to protect each worker covered by the OSH Act. Existing and emerging hazards continue to grow the portfolio and responsibilities of OSHA and other job safety agencies, without increased funding, not even to match inflation. At these levels, the agencies continue to have a paltry number of staff to write standards, analyze data, conduct inspections, conduct needed research on important hazards and respond to emerging threats.

Our regulatory protective systems have been weakened over decades and still are under threat. Job safety agencies need to be rebuilt, not only restored to the pre-Trump era, but in ways that reflect a modern approach to creating data-informed policy, issuing strong standards to address longstanding and emerging hazards, increasing transparency and information access, and eliminating barriers to workers reporting injuries. The whistleblower program needs significant improvement; there is still a major backlog of cases and new initiatives have not made a dent in the program’s significant issues. OSHA can make changes to more timely reach out to complainants and their co-workers in order to identify problematic workplaces, but the whistleblower law has also significantly limited the agency and needs to be strengthened.

Severe inequities in dangerous working conditions have created unacceptable disparities in those who face the largest burdens of disease, injury and death because of their jobs, especially as our nation’s demographics are changing. Initiatives to address the safety and health risks posed by changes in the workforce and employment arrangements must take more prominence, and workplace safety and health regulations must be seen as a significant intervention to impact people’s lives in a meaningful way. We need to continue to elevate initiatives that address the increased risk of fatalities and injuries faced by workers of color, immigrant workers, aging workers and young workers who are often exploited, and enhance efforts to protect temporary and contract workers.

Workplace violence is a growing and serious threat, particularly to women workers and those in the health care and social services sectors. OSHA must issue a workplace violence standard, and issue rules on heat illness prevention, emergency response and infectious disease. More attention and resources are needed to address health hazards in the workplace. OSHA standards for chemical hazards are obsolete and must be updated. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must continue to fully implement the new toxic chemicals reform law and coordinate with OSHA and NIOSH, taking action to address the risks to the public and to workers. New initiatives are needed to address musculoskeletal disorders and combustible dust.

Job safety agencies need to fully enforce their standards and other workplace safety laws by developing a proactive enforcement plan across industries, fully investigating complaints, performing on-site inspections, issuing violations and penalties that reflect the size and scope of the real problem and deter other employers, and ensure workers’ rights to report unsafe working conditions and refuse dangerous work. Workers and their representatives must be able to fully participate in the workplace inspections as employers and their representatives do. 

In mining, MSHA must continue initiatives to focus increased attention on mines with a record of repeated violations and stronger enforcement action against mines with patterns of violations. Congress must strengthen job safety laws to prevent tragedies like the Massey Upper Big Branch mining disaster, which killed 29 miners in West Virginia. Improvements in the Mine Safety and Health Act are needed to give MSHA more authority to shut down dangerous mines and to enhance enforcement against repeat violators.

The Occupational Safety and Health Act now is more than 50 years old and is out of date. Congress must pass the Protecting America’s Workers Act (H.R. 2998) to extend the law’s coverage to workers currently excluded, strengthen civil and criminal penalties for violations, and strengthen the rights of workers and their representatives. Improvements to update and strengthen the OSH Act’s anti-retaliation provisions are particularly needed, so workers can report job hazards and injuries, and exercise safety and health rights without fear. 

The nation must remain committed to protecting workers from injury, disease and death. Preventing injury, illness and death at work to restore dignity, save lives, improve livelihoods, and reduce burdens on families and communities must be a high priority. Employers must meet their responsibilities to protect workers and be held accountable if they put workers in danger. Only then can the promise of safe jobs for all of America’s workers be fulfilled.

What Needs To Be Done

Workers need to be able to fully exercise their rights to a workplace free from recognized hazards, including the ability to report injuries and illnesses without retaliation, raise unsafe working conditions, be able to fully utilize stop work authority, come home unharmed at the end of the workday and be fully compensated when the job has injured or made them ill. 

This requires refocused national attention, energy and action on the enormous role and impact job safety and health agencies play to provide workplace oversight and prevent the disease, injuries and death that plague working people across the country. There must be new dedication and leadership to substantially increase their resources to protect workers, and address ongoing and emerging safety and health problems. Employers and elected leaders must recognize that employment is a significant determinant of health and take leadership to make workplaces safer. 

Congress continues to fund job safety at stagnant levels, allowing an OSHA budget that still only amounts to $3.93 to protect each worker covered by the OSH Act. Existing and emerging hazards continue to grow the portfolio and responsibilities of OSHA and other job safety agencies, without increased funding, not even to match inflation. At these levels, the agencies continue to have a paltry number of staff to write standards, analyze data, conduct inspections, conduct needed research on important hazards and respond to emerging threats.

Our regulatory protective systems have been weakened over decades and still are under threat. Job safety agencies need to be rebuilt, not only restored to the pre-Trump era, but in ways that reflect a modern approach to creating data-informed policy, issuing strong standards to address longstanding and emerging hazards, increasing transparency and information access, and eliminating barriers to workers reporting injuries. The whistleblower program needs significant improvement; there is still a major backlog of cases and new initiatives have not made a dent in the program’s significant issues. OSHA can make changes to more timely reach out to complainants and their co-workers in order to identify problematic workplaces, but the whistleblower law has also significantly limited the agency and needs to be strengthened.

Severe inequities in dangerous working conditions have created unacceptable disparities in those who face the largest burdens of disease, injury and death because of their jobs, especially as our nation’s demographics are changing. Initiatives to address the safety and health risks posed by changes in the workforce and employment arrangements must take more prominence, and workplace safety and health regulations must be seen as a significant intervention to impact people’s lives in a meaningful way. We need to continue to elevate initiatives that address the increased risk of fatalities and injuries faced by workers of color, immigrant workers, aging workers and young workers who are often exploited, and enhance efforts to protect temporary and contract workers.

Workplace violence is a growing and serious threat, particularly to women workers and those in the health care and social services sectors. OSHA must issue a workplace violence standard, and issue rules on heat illness prevention, emergency response and infectious disease. More attention and resources are needed to address health hazards in the workplace. OSHA standards for chemical hazards are obsolete and must be updated. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must continue to fully implement the new toxic chemicals reform law and coordinate with OSHA and NIOSH, taking action to address the risks to the public and to workers. New initiatives are needed to address musculoskeletal disorders and combustible dust.

Job safety agencies need to fully enforce their standards and other workplace safety laws by developing a proactive enforcement plan across industries, fully investigating complaints, performing on-site inspections, issuing violations and penalties that reflect the size and scope of the real problem and deter other employers, and ensure workers’ rights to report unsafe working conditions and refuse dangerous work. Workers and their representatives must be able to fully participate in the workplace inspections as employers and their representatives do. 

In mining, MSHA must continue initiatives to focus increased attention on mines with a record of repeated violations and stronger enforcement action against mines with patterns of violations. Congress must strengthen job safety laws to prevent tragedies like the Massey Upper Big Branch mining disaster, which killed 29 miners in West Virginia. Improvements in the Mine Safety and Health Act are needed to give MSHA more authority to shut down dangerous mines and to enhance enforcement against repeat violators.

The Occupational Safety and Health Act now is more than 50 years old and is out of date. Congress must pass the Protecting America’s Workers Act (H.R. 2998) to extend the law’s coverage to workers currently excluded, strengthen civil and criminal penalties for violations, and strengthen the rights of workers and their representatives. Improvements to update and strengthen the OSH Act’s anti-retaliation provisions are particularly needed, so workers can report job hazards and injuries, and exercise safety and health rights without fear. 

The nation must remain committed to protecting workers from injury, disease and death. Preventing injury, illness and death at work to restore dignity, save lives, improve livelihoods, and reduce burdens on families and communities must be a high priority. Employers must meet their responsibilities to protect workers and be held accountable if they put workers in danger. Only then can the promise of safe jobs for all of America’s workers be fulfilled.

READ THE FULL REPORT HERE.