May 2017 Archives

Minnesota residents may not be surprised to learn that severe work-related injuries are more common in hazardous workplaces like sawmills, steel manufacturing facilities and automobile assembly plants, but they may not know that workers in the poultry processing industry are even more likely to require hospitalization or lose a limb or an eye than their counterparts in these seemingly more hazardous fields. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration collects severe injury reports from employers around the country, and researchers from the National Employment Law Project have relied on this data to come up with a list of the nation's most dangerous jobs.

An AFL-CIO report has found that 150 workers died daily in 2015 from work-related injuries or illnesses that were preventable. In all, 4,836 workers died from injuries while between 50,000 and 60,000 died from disease related to their job. Furthermore, workers in Minneapolis and throughout the country are less safe under the Trump administration than they were during the Obama administration, according to the report. The AFL-CIO president said that while the Obama administration had strengthened many enforcement policies and improved workers' rights, those same safety initiatives were now under threat. The report estimated that since the Occupational Safety and Health Act passed in 1970, the lives of more than 550,000 workers have been saved.