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Is your Job Killing You? page 1 of 5 | |||||
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A Safety Survival Survey |
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Jim Young | |||
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You're a cashier in a grocery store. By day, you swipe thousands of items of varying weights and shapes across a price scanner. At night, you can't sleep because of the throbbing pain in your shoulders.
You're a cab driver. Your back aches from 10-12 hour shifts. And you can't shake the experience of being robbed at knife point in your own car. You're a non-union construction worker, part of a "streamlined" crew building a trench. There's no flag man to signal the pay loader when you're in or out of the trench. You're scared you'll be buried alive. It's been 28 years since the adoption of Occupational Safety and Health Act. Still, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, at least 300,000 American workers have died at their jobs since then, and another 1.8 million have died from job-related illnesses. That's 200 dead men and women a day, more each year than died during the Vietnam War. Another two million have been permanently disabled in workplace accidents. And each year more than 6 million Americans report job-related injuries or illnesses. Not only is that toll unconscionable for workers, it's costly for employers. The price tag is $171 billion in workers' comp, social security, and lost wages and benefits, according to a 1997 study from the Archives of Internal Medicine. That's equal to the combined profits of the 20 largest companies in the U.S. and makes workplace injuries an epidemic on the same financial scale as cancer and AIDS. |
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Web Lab |
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