4679 Dead American Workers

Last week, the U.S. Department of Labor released its preliminary numbers of deaths in American workplaces. 4,679 workers died in 2014, a number that will almost certainly be revised higher (which always happens). That rate is the same as 2013, but the raw number is higher because of a growing workforce. Who is dying? Workers in the oil industry, especially in the Bakken oil boom of North Dakota; immigrants working dangerous jobs and who lack the English skills for rapid communication in emergency situations, and older workers. For the latter group, death on the job 9 percent, probably because they were too poor to retire thanks to the structural changes in the American economy brought on by NAFTA, the lack of an economic safety net for older workers, long-term debt issues, etc.

But these numbers do not tell the whole story because they do not include the number of people who died making products that ended up back in the United States. If 4679 dead workers in a nation this size doesn’t seem all that high really, that’s because we’ve exported much of our dangerous work and our employers have exported the dangerous work precisely because they didn’t want to make their factories safer in the U.S. and deal with the pesky unions who would force them to have safe workplaces. Workers dying in the textile industry, such as the 1129 dead at Rana Plaza making goods for the American market should be counted in the death toll of American workplaces because they are American workplaces, even if they are overseas. The same of workers in electronics, mining, steel, and other industries who are either owned by American companies or are using contractors for American companies.

It’s impossible then to really know what the human toll of the American workplace really is, but it’s a whole lot higher than it should be.