An average of 13 workers a day, or 4,690 during the year, were killed on the job in 2010, according to the 2012 edition of the AFL-CIO's annual Death on the Job report. Those numbers don't include workers who die from occupational diseases—all we have for those deaths is an estimate of 50,000 each year. Workplace injuries and illnesses are also vastly under-reported—3.8 million were reported but the actual number is believed to be two or three times larger.
In large part because 2010 was the year of the Upper Big Branch mine explosion, which killed 29 miners, West Virginia had the highest fatality rate in the country at 13.1 fatalities per 100,000 workers, compared with a national rate of 3.6 fatal injuries per 100,000 workers. It was followed by Wyoming and Alaska, while New Hampshire had the lowest fatality rate, at 0.9 per 100,000, followed by Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Workers in agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting faced the highest fatality rate, at 27.9 per 100,000 (but heaven forbid the Department of Labor limit child labor on farms), followed by mining and transportation and warehousing.
Latino workers face a fatality rate 8 percent higher than the national average, with 62 percent of fatal injuries to Latino workers found among workers born outside the United States.
While the Obama administration has dramatically stepped up enforcement of occupational safety and health laws over the Bush administration's total disregard for the issue, there are still inadequate levels of inspections and penalties for violations; "it would take federal OSHA 131 years to inspect each workplace under its jurisdiction just once." There is just one inspector for every 58,945 workers, while the International Labor Organization's benchmark is one inspector for every 10,000 workers in industrialized nations. In most states, companies face insultingly small fines for fatal injuries to their workers; the median penalty for a fatality investigation by federal OSHA was $7,900; for state plans it was $5,900.
And all the while an average of 13 workers are killed each day on the job, Republicans in Congress have been blocking new regulations that would protect workers from workplace injuries and illness, and trying to roll back existing protections.