Shutting Down the ‘Death Calendar’

On the “death calendar” for Allegheny County, Pa., 1906-1907, each red ‘X’ told a story of pain and loss.

Steelworkers, miners and factory hands were crushed into the machinery of the new Industrial Age, killed at work by the dozens every month. Each death was dutifully noted in red ink; a rare day passed without at least one mark on the calendar. Some days, so many were killed in that single county, the marks crowded into the margins.

In all, 526 worker deaths were recorded that fiscal year, in the first systematic survey of job-related fatalities in the United States this century. The numbers shocked the nation and helped spark public outrage toward the routine hazards faced by workers nearly 100 years ago.

But decades would pass before that outrage resulted in comprehensive federal laws protecting workers on the job. In the meantime, a series of labor leaders, progressive politicians, journalists and social crusaders struggled to bring workplace dangers to light, while business interests doggedly fought the reforms they advocated.

Allegheny was far from an anomaly. The same year of the death count, journalist John Spargo visited the Pennsylvania coal mining town of St. Clair, where boys as young as 10 were put to work sorting slate from coal. The boys sat in a dust-filled, darkened room, hunched over as chunks of coal and rocks rushed by on chutes underneath them.

Spargo described the scene in chilling detail: “Crouched over the chutes, the boys sit hour after hour picking out the pieces of slate and other refuse from the coal as it rushes past to the washers. From the cramped position they have to assume, most of them become more or less deformed and bent-backed like old men. . . .

“The coal is hard, and accidents to the hands, such as a cut, broken or crushed fingers, are common among the boys. Sometimes there is a worse accident: a terrified shriek is heard, and a boy is mangled and torn in the machinery, or disappears in the chute to be picked up later smothered and dead. Clouds of dust fill the breakers and are inhaled by the boys, laying the foundations for asthma and miners’ consumption.”

Other writers chronicled similarly horrid conditions--often involving child labor--in textile mills and tenement sweatshops on the East Coast. Investigator Marie Van Norst described the interior of a South Carolina cotton mill near the turn of the century: “The air of the room is white with cotton, although the spool room is perhaps the freest. These little particles are breathed into the nose, drawn into the lungs. Lung disease and pneumonia--consumption--are the constant, never-absent scourge of the mill village. The girls expectorate to such an extent that the floor is nauseous with it.”

At the time, sickness and injury on the job were almost an inevitable part of life for the most vulnerable of unskilled workers--immigrants, African Americans, women and children. Those workers also had to contend with long hours, squalid living conditions and wages that kept them hungry and in debt. And attempts to improve conditions by forming unions were often met with force, either by hired security guards or government militia.

In 1914, the average working day was 10 hours, although 14-hour days were not unusual, and workers normally put in six days a week. Child labor and home work were common. The industrial accident rate was appallingly high. According to a federal report, 35,000 U.S. workers were killed on the job in 1914, and another 700,000 were injured.

Treated more as commodities than as human beings, production workers were routinely locked inside plants during the long workdays--sometimes with tragic consequences. Such was the case in 1911, when fire raced through the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. in New York, killing 146 trapped workers, nearly all women.

The Triangle fire became a benchmark in the fight for federally assured worker safety. Another was the 1907 explosion of a coal mine in Monongah, W. Va., that killed at least 362 men and boys.

In those early years of the century, writers also chronicled high injury rates in industries such as Chicago’s meatpacking business, so brutally laid bare in 1906 by Upton Sinclair in “The Jungle.”

As Sinclair penned his fact-based novel, a young doctor treating families in the working-class slums of Chicago decided to make the study of occupational illnesses her life’s work--a decision that would have an enormous impact on the development of worker protection laws.

Alice Hamilton became the era’s most effective advocate for the working poor. By interviewing scores of workers and meticulously documenting their job-related illnesses and injuries--from carbon monoxide poisoning in steelworkers to a syndrome known as “dead fingers” suffered by men using jackhammers--she gave scientific backing to what had previously been only anecdotal concerns.

The research pioneered by Hamilton, who went on to become the first woman on the faculty of Harvard University, led to new regulations and voluntary changes by some industrial employers that improved the health of workers.

But change came slowly. The first workers’ compensation laws were passed in the 1910s, and in the ensuing years, a patchwork of protective state laws went on the books. Still, a federal law protecting all workers proved elusive.

“There was no social safety net, and certainly no workplace safety net,” said Peg Seminario, director of Occupational Safety and Health at the AFL-CIO. “Other than the Walsh-Healy Act of the 1930s, which put in standards only for federal contractors, there was no comprehensive framework for worker protection until well into the second half of the century.”

Federal health and safety bills were introduced repeatedly in the ensuing decades, but, facing intense lobbying by business interests, they were doomed to fail. The accidents and illnesses continued, killing staggering numbers of American workers.

Mining--still the nation’s most hazardous industry--killed hundreds of workers a year in explosions, tunnel collapses and hauling accidents. But it wasn’t until 1968, when a major coal mine explosion in Farmington, W. Va., killed 78 miners and prompted a major strike, that federal legislators took action.

The 1969 Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, which established standards and expanded federal enforcement powers, was a major advance on several fronts: It saved lives immediately, cutting the death rate by about 50%. The act also set the stage for far more comprehensive federal legislation that passed the following year.

In the final days of 1970, at a time of agitation for civil rights and environmental protection as well as worker safety, the sweeping Occupational Safety and Health Act became law.

The act created two government agencies: the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which deals with prevention and enforcement under the Department of Labor, and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which conducts research on work-related injuries, illnesses and fatalities under the Department of Health and Human Services.

The long-awaited law ushered in a period of rapidly declining injury and illness rates, although agency officials themselves note that at least some of that decline can also be attributed to changes in technology and in the U.S. economy.

A recent review of on-the-job safety by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention described a vastly improved record, but one that is still far from perfect. “Despite all the accomplishments . . . workers continue to die from preventable injuries sustained on the job,” stated the June 11 edition of the Morbidity and Mortality Report, which highlighted mining and agriculture as areas that need more attention.

In fact, last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 6,026 workers were killed in job-related accidents. About 6 million on-the-job injuries were reported at private workplaces in 1997.

Observers such as Seminario of the AFL-CIO also pointed out that OSHA’s enforcement strength has fluctuated with the political mood of the moment and that injury rates often climb when enforcement funds are cut.

It also has been difficult for OSHA to keep up with some industry changes, such as the rapid transformation of meatpacking in the late 1980s. During that time, industry leaders divided the butchering process into small steps that could be performed by workers with little training--primarily recent immigrants. Each worker made one cut, repeated over and over as a fast production line kept new pieces coming.

The repetitive stress led to soaring rates of muscular-skeletal injuries--which peaked at 45.5 serious injuries per hundred workers in 1991. Only after investigations by the United Food and Commercial Workers union and a series of journalistic exposes did Congress act, by increasing OSHA’s budget and insisting on a higher level of enforcement. Injury rates have dropped, but at about 30 per 100 are still among the highest of any industry.

High repetitive-stress injuries in meatpacking and poultry processing, as well as auto assembly, prompted OSHA to develop “ergonomic standards.” Among other things, those standards would force employers with high injury rates to identify risk factors and reduce them, by changing job descriptions, offering training or other means.

Despite the high injury rates and an estimated cost of $60 billion a year in workers’ compensation claims and lost workdays, those standards have yet to be adopted after nine years of development. A draft was issued for review in February, but is not likely to be approved for at least a year.

Some employers have argued that existing rules are sufficient, that injury rates already are dropping and another set of rules will only introduce needless bureaucracy. They argue it is in an employer’s best interest to keep injury rates low.

Labor leaders, on the other hand, say the problem is that workers suffering from repetitive stress--from assembly workers to clerks in data processing--are predominantly minorities, women and immigrants, people with traditionally less political power.

The fight over ergonomic standards also points out a challenge for the future of occupational safety: Increasingly, work-related injuries are invisible and slow to manifest themselves, and may stem from more than one source.