For as long as humanity has labored, people have been getting injured and dying at work. When the “mill girls” of Lowell, Massachusetts, formed one of the earliest labor organizations in the US, in the mid-1800s, one of the things they hoped to win was better working conditions; early labor leaders like Sarah Bagley were tired of seeing their teenage coworkers get maimed by the machines they tended.
As they knew all too well, the Industrial Revolution had birthed the industrial accident: the factory fire, the machinery mangling, and many more. When the Gilded Age dawned and trains raced across the country connecting — and consuming — huge swaths of North America, railroad workers who kept the iron horses running died by the hundreds in steam-boiler explosions. Estimates of industrial fatalities during the period between the Civil War and World War I put the annual numbers between 25,000 and 80,000 per year.
Those were some of labor’s glory days, too, when hundreds of thousands of workers joined unions, led strikes, and voted for the likes of Eugene V. Debs, a former railway man turned socialist trade unionist, for president. They knew what it felt like to walk into work not knowing whether or not it would be their last day on Earth, and, as I chronicled in my book Fight Like Hell, they fought hard to change that. Without those waves of militant worker activism, our current federal labor laws, safety regulations, and occupational health agencies would not exist.
A century later, one would imagine, the situation would have improved, and workers would no longer be expected to risk dismemberment or death on the job. After all, we’ve had over a hundred years to get it right. Our industrial economy has grown in leaps and bounds. Technological advances have transformed how, where, and when we work. There is no good reason under the sun why any worker should ever feel unsafe on the job. Yet we haven’t made nearly as much progress as we should have. In 2022, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded 5,190 workplace fatalities, an 8.9% increase from 2020. In 2021, a worker died every 101 minutes from a workplace injury. Workers of all ages, backgrounds, and identities are left asking: How much is my life worth?
Until the middle of the 20th century, child labor was not only common, it was preferred by some employers. Children were weaker and easier to exploit. Their small, nimble hands could be put to use doing more delicate tasks — or reaching inside machinery. The passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) finally placed federal restrictions on these practices, limiting legal child labor to those ages 16 and over, except for hazardous occupations, which had a minimum age of 18.
Due to a variety of carve-outs and exceptions, however, the FLSA did not solve these problems or even impact many child workers; it covered only about 6% of the 850,000 children working in 1938. Entire industries were left out, like agriculture, where children have continued to labor in the fields, many of them immigrants who have even fewer protections than other child laborers.
Recently, there has been a push among Republican lawmakers to further loosen our already wobbly child labor laws. Meanwhile, teens are dying at work. In July, a 16-year-old boy from Guatemala, Duvan Tomas Perez, was killed while working in a slaughterhouse in Mississippi. In June, 16-year-old Michael Schuls lost his life in an accident at a saw mill in Wisconsin, where Republican state legislators have proposed lowering the working age to 14. Will Hampton, 16, was killed at a landfill in Missouri — another state working to relax its child labor laws — when he was pinned between a semi-truck and its trailer. Schuls and Hampton were working legally under state and federal law, laws that are clearly failing to protect children on the job. How many more dead children will it take for those laws to change?
The lack of proper protections also affects adult workers. It is shocking how many incidents resulting in workplace injury or death involve employers who are, technically, following the rules. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is the federal agency tasked with enforcing workplace safety laws and holding employers accountable. But, according to a 2023 report from the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the median penalty a company faces when a worker dies on the job is $12,063 under federal OSHA, and $7,000 under one of the agency's state branches.
Think about that for a moment: $7,000 for a life. You can buy a lot with seven grand, but you can’t buy back a lifetime of joy and despair, love and struggle, laughter, tears, and humanity. We are worth so much more than $7,000.
Then there are the employers who actually do violate the law. For many of these violators, the fines they are required to pay barely count as pocket change. Amazon, for example, was cited by OSHA in February for failing to keep workers safe. Multiple workers have died in the company's facilities, including Caes Gruesbeck, a man who died from blunt-force trauma in an Indiana warehouse. His death is under investigation by the state’s OSHA. Reuters reported that the company has racked up around $150,000 in OSHA fines since January of this year. Comparatively, in 2022, the company generated over $500 billion in revenue. (Amazon spokesperson Maureen Lynch Vogel's comment to Teen Vogue is included at the bottom of this piece)
There is also the problem of what happens when there isn’t even a law in place to violate. This summer, heatstroke and other heat-related illnesses have claimed the lives of far too many workers, but there is currently no specific federal law protecting workers from extreme heat. According to that AFL-CIO report, 343 workers died each day from “hazardous working conditions.” The definition of hazardous covers a lot of ground, but as the climate crisis intensifies, excess heat will continue to top the list, especially for those who work outdoors. As the AFL-CIO report noted, Black and Latino workers continue to die at a higher rate, and 64% of Latino workers who died on the job in 2021 were immigrants.
This summer, brutal heat waves scorched huge sections of the US, where thousands of workers in a variety of industries, including agriculture, construction, and transportation, struggled to survive the murderous temperatures. Not all of them made it. Last month, 26-year-old farm worker Dario Mendoza collapsed in the fields of Yuma County, Arizona; the area was experiencing a severe heat wave, and Mendoza succumbed to heatstroke. He left behind two young children. Efraín López Garcia, 29, met the same fate in South Florida. So did a 28-year-old Mexican man in Parkland, who showed up on his first day of work with his work visa in hand, and was found the next day unconscious in a drainage ditch. The contractor who employed the young worker faces $15,625 in proposed penalties for his death, according to OSHA.
Tony Rufus, a Teamster working in a Kroger distribution center in Memphis, did not die under the sun’s rays; according to a report in The Guardian, Rufus had been searching for a way to cool down all day, finally stepping over to the produce section to take a quick break. That’s where he took his last breath.
Teamsters Local 667 union chief Maurice Wiggins told the local Fox affiliate, “The union has been trying our best to tell the company we need extra breaks, extra cool down, different types of refreshments, other than water. The company denied all. It was, like, 98 outside, so it had to be, like, 108 or 110 inside.” (In a statement, Kroger told FOX13, “The safety of our associates has always been our top priority. Kroger Supply Chain continues to take the necessary steps to ensure a safe working environment for our associates. We have contacted the associate’s family to offer our condolences and support during this difficult time.” Teen Vogue has also reached out to Kroger for comment.)
In addition to deadly heat, the AFL-CIO has estimated that about 120,000 people lost their lives to occupational diseases in 2021. Health care workers are regularly exposed to COVID-19 and other viruses; coal miners and construction workers breath in toxic silica dust; warehouse workers fall victim to musculoskeletal disorders; the list goes on and on.
In Central Appalachia, coal miners in their 30s and 40s are fighting an epidemic of black lung disease spurred by changes in mining technology and the relentless pace at which mine operators demand they work. Black lung is perhaps one of the best-known occupational diseases, yet the federal government has dragged its feet on enacting stronger safety regulations to protect miners from the deadly dust.
Many of the cases referenced above were or are under investigation by OSHA. On the policy level, an array of unions, worker leaders, environmental groups, and labor-friendly politicians have been pushing for increased heat protections for workers. But to truly address the heat crisis, the black lung crisis, and the overall lack of regard for worker life, health, and safety in this country, OSHA and other safety agencies, like the Mine Safety and Health Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, need more funding, more staff, and more power to punish employers who fail to protect their workers. And that’s just a start. Again, we’ve had over a century to right the wrongs perpetrated against workers at the dawn of this nation’s Industrial Age, and we are still woefully behind.
Ultimately, the power rests in our hands as workers. Each time we hear of another fallen laborer, we must continue to ask ourselves: Was their death worth the wealth they created? Did they get a chance to enjoy even a little piece of those profits before they were crushed by the gears of capitalism or did it all trickle up to some stranger who never even knew their name? How can we place a monetary value on a life? And when we do, how can the amount be so impossibly small?
If reading all of this has made you sad or uncomfortable or angry, consider what to do with those feelings. Are workers going to sit by and hope that everyone makes it home safe tonight? Or are we going to organize, build working-class power, hold bosses and politicians to account, and force the changes we so desperately need? We cannot survive another century of this.
Never let yourself forget this truth, one we have been reminding ourselves of for hundreds of years: Our lives are worth so much more than this.
Editor's note: In an email to Teen Vogue, Amazon spokesperson Maureen Lynch Vogel said, “We take the safety and health of our employees very seriously, and we don’t believe the government’s allegations reflect the reality of safety at our sites. We’ve demonstrated how we work to reduce risks and keep employees safe, and our publicly available data show we’ve improved injury rates in the U.S. by 23% between 2019 and 2022." Asked specifically about Carl Gruesbeck's May 2023 death, Vogel said, “We continue to grieve the loss of our colleague, and our thoughts remain with his loved ones and our team at the facility. We’ve worked closely with authorities to thoroughly investigate the incident and implement corrective actions to enhance safety. We’ve also ensured our employees have everything they need to feel supported.”
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