America’s deadliest jobs: More than 340 workers are killed every day

A teenager suffocated in a soybean warehouse in Greenwood, Missouri. In Guam, a falling crane crushed a ship’s rigger to death. In Maplesville, Alabama, faulty cables saw a 36-year-old paper mill worker electrocuted and killed.

These are just three recent and tragic examples of the workplace hazards claiming the lives of 343 workers every day, according to AFL-CIO, the country’s largest labor union group.

And the death toll is rising.

In 2021, the latest year for which data is available, approximately 5,190 workers were killed.

As a percentage of the total workforce, that’s the highest percentage America has seen since 2016.

Riegler Blacktop, an asphalt mixing and paving company in Florence, Kentucky, posted online earlier this month about the tragic loss of five-year employee Autumn Collinsworth

The numbers are particularly bad for minorities. Latino workers die above average. In 2021, about 656 black workers died on the job, the group’s highest death toll in 19 years.

The general trend over the past half century has been towards safer factories, mines and farms, but experts told DailyMail.com that the latest numbers represent an alarming step backwards.

They blamed the shortage of inspectors to monitor workplaces and called for higher penalties for those bosses who take shortcuts that lead to death.

The group’s president, Liz Shuler, said Americans should be “alarmed and outraged by the tragic data.”

“Each worker who died on the job represents another empty chair at a family’s kitchen table,” Shuler said.

“It is unconscionable that in the richest country in the world, black and Latino workers are experiencing the highest occupational death rates in nearly two decades.”

Mom-of-four Autumn Collinsworth, a asphalt road roller, passed away this month in Kentucky

A recent workplace tragedy involved Autumn Collinsworth, a mother of four and machine operator at Riegler Blacktop, an asphalt mixing and paving company in Florence, Kentucky.

Collinsworth, also known as Fabre, worked his way up from part-time flagger to role operator in five years, company president Michael Riegler said online.

She died on April 12 in a “terrible accident on a job site,” Riegler added, without elaborating.

The company is investigating the tragedy and is working with local authorities and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the agency in charge of inspecting workplaces.

Later, in a Facebook post, Collinsworth’s eldest son, Brayden, posted a picture of the family together at Christmas time, dressed in a plaid.

He asked friends and family for donations to help raise the “three other children I will be taking care of from now on.”

“Rest in peace, Mom,” he added.

“Rest in peace mom,” Brayden Collinsworth posted of his mother’s tragic death in an accident at work. He asked friends and family for donations to help raise the “three other kids who are sick as of now”

A roofer works on a mansion after a hurricane in Mexico Beach, Florida. Roofers, along with loggers, fishermen and hunters, have one of the most dangerous jobs in the country

Workers clean up oil from the rocks and beach at a beach park in Goleta, California, after a spill. The oil and gas sector has an alarmingly high number of fatalities

Collinsworth is certainly not the only recent tragedy in the construction industry.

Construction, along with agriculture, forestry, fishing, hunting, mining, quarrying, transportation and hydrocarbons are the most dangerous sectors of the US $27 trillion a year economy.

In 2021, nearly 1,000 construction workers died on the job.

Roofers, who spend many hours on sloping roofs of buildings, have one of the most dangerous jobs in the country.

But America’s riskiest trade is logging, followed by fishermen and hunters, pilots and flight engineers, iron and steel workers, truck drivers and garbage collectors.

Many of the deaths are concentrated in six states known for their rugged outdoor work: Wyoming, North Dakota, Montana, Louisiana, Alaska and New Mexico.

Children and young adult workers are increasingly caught up in the carnage.

Many of them are unlicensed immigrants toiling in hazardous conditions – and bosses know they’re not likely to complain.

In 2021, 24 minors and 350 adults under 25 died on the job, the union report said.

The problem, experts said, is a lack of enforcement — OSHA doesn’t have enough inspectors and the civil penalties it imposes are too light to deter cost-cutting bosses.

A welder works on an overpass as part of an infrastructure project in Irving, Texas. Construction and metalworkers are also prone to fatal occupational injuries

“Every worker who dies on the job represents another empty chair at a family’s kitchen table,” said AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler

The agency has just 1,871 inspectors to monitor the 10.8 million workplaces under its jurisdiction.

That’s just enough inspectors to check every workshop every 190 years.

“That’s not a lot of law enforcement officers when you divide it by 50 states,” Reid Maki, a child labor expert with the National Consumers League, a nonprofit advocacy group, told DailyMail.com.

‘Agriculture certainly receives too little attention. There are millions of hectares of farms that are not investigated.’

Meanwhile, the average sentence for an employee’s death is between $7,000 and $12,063, depending on whether the case is handled by state or federal detectives.

Since 1970, only 128 worker deaths have been prosecuted under OSHA.

AFL-CIO’s director of safety, Rebecca Reindel, urged Congress to spend more money and increase the number of inspectors.

“It’s time they got the funding and staff they need to create and enforce worker protection standards,” Reindel said.

‘Employers must be held accountable.’

Wisconsin-based Packers Sanitation Services is one company that recently managed to evade a hefty workplace safety fine.

The cleaning company illegally employed 102 minors in 13 hazardous meatpacking plants from Minnesota to Texas and was fined just $1.5 million in February.

A Packers employee cleans with limited visibility at the JBS factory in Worthington, Minnesota

Some of them suffered chemical burns from powerful cleaning agents and had to clean dangerous carcass splitters on night shifts.

Maki, the coordinator of the league’s Child Labor Coalition, said the sentence was too light to deter future abusers.

“You have to scare the employers that there will be consequences for illegally hiring children,” Maki said.

“We need to send a strong signal to companies that illegally employ children in hazardous environments to stop, and the way to do that is with very heavy fines that hurt the company’s profits.”

Industry experts say the Packers scandal is just the tip of the iceberg of the US child labor crisis.

Federal investigators recorded a massive 37 percent increase in the number of children working illegally in U.S. factories, eateries and other workplaces over the past year, a DailyMail.com investigation revealed.

Inspectors from the Department of Labor found 3,876 children working in violation of labor rules in fiscal year 2022. That includes a worrying 688 who toiled in hazardous conditions, often with dangerous equipment – ​​a 26 percent increase from 2021.

Labor officials and child abuse experts said these numbers are only a fraction of the number of people actually working in violation of labor rules, which could number in the hundreds of thousands.

Faced with low unemployment and a shortage of mature workers, bosses have turned to teens to fill the gap, experts say. Unscrupulous managers also benefit from the influx of desperate young migrants who need money and don’t ask questions.