WASHINGTON—A worker dies from corporate negligence every 104 miutes. The suppliers of auto parts for Hyundai and Kia cars. The Subway restaurant chain. The nation’s biggest homebuilder, which let Donald Trump’s vicious and violent ICE agents raid its job sites. A snack food company that puts migrants’ children into hazardous factory jobs.
“Workers are still being poisoned, injured, exploited and killed on the job,” says Jessica Martinez, executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (NACOSH), which released its annual “Dirty Dozen” report on the worst job safety and health violators nominated by its local councils and allies, and why those corporate bad actors made the list–though they’re not alone.
“When employers say ‘The system is working,’ we have to ask ‘Working for who?’”
The auto parts firm, Subway, the snack food firm, and the homebuilder who let ICE agents raid its job sites—especially during “Operation Metro Surge” in the Twin Cities—are all in the report. And the report doesn’t even include the worst of the worst: Amazon.
The monster retailer and warehouse firm, which employs one-third of all U.S. warehouse workers but accounts for almost half of the workplace injuries in that industry, had such a bad job safety record for so long that NACOSH put it last year into a special category of permanent violators. Amazon and its multibillionaire majority owner, Jeff Bezos, a Trump pal, is also virulently anti-union.
Amazon’s “absence” gave NACOSH and its allies a chance to spotlight other firms who put profits before people and shirk job safety measures, including warnings and fines from the federal and state Occupational Safety and Health Administrations (OSHAs). The fines, Martinez says, are declining.
Martinez said NACOSH identified three emerging trends in this report: The increasing danger of high heat to both indoor and outdoor workers, the increasing corporate use of supply chains and subcontractors to let big powerhouse firms to evade responsibility for safety, health and even wages for their workers, and the high proportion of Black, brown and migrant workers who are victims.
“And retaliation is widespread. If workers speak out, they may lose their freedom, their wages and even their jobs.” That’s though one OSHA responsibility under the law is to protect whistleblowers.
Not surprisingly, some firms which injured their workers face union organizing drives. And one, the SkyChef airline food service chain at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport, got hit with a labor-pushed job safety city ordinance there, too.
NACOSH released its report, entitled Case File: The Dirty Dozen, in the runup to Workers Memorial Day, April 28. Its subtitle is “When companies put profit first, workers pay the price.” The AFL-CIO also plans its own annual report, Death on the Job: A Toll Of Neglect drawing more on federal data.
“In 2024, 5,070 workers were killed on the job, or one every 104 minutes,” NACOSH reported, using the latest available federal figures. “Behind each of these deaths is a preventable failure of companies to protect workers and of systems to hold them accountable.”
In contrast to the two fact-filled reports, and the workers’ stories which NACOSH featured, the GOP Trump regime Labor Department planned a Workers Memorial Day ceremony at the DOL headquarters in D.C.
That rite conveniently overlooks that in his proposed federal budget for the fiscal year starting October 1, Trump wants to cut funds for all worker protection agencies–OSHA, the Mine Safety and Health Administration and the Wage and Hour Division—by $234 million combined. And the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, which rides herd on federal contractors and subcontractors to ensure they obey civil rights laws, would also die. Trump’s “savings”: $101 million.
NACOSH Executive Director Martinez said Trump wants to cut $50 million from OSHA alone, down to $582 million. Inspections would drop by 20%, and the anticipated number of corporate “willful” violations of the Occupational Safety and Health Act would drop by 42%.
There would also be a decline in OSHA’s use of its “general duty clause,” the catchall but vague provision of the law that covers all workers and all violations, except those with specific standards.
But that “general duty” to protect workers is also often the toughest charge to document and prove.
Past Republican regimes, kowtowing to fanatical corporate opposition to OSHA, pushed voluntary compliance, and exemption from inspections, too. It’s never worked. Not that there are that many OSHA inspectors. NACOSH points out OSHA’s total workforce was 1,850, before Trump’s firings and RIFs. There are no figures on how many have left.
Federal OSHA inspectors are supposed to cover eight million workplaces, not counting those state OSHAs cover, or federal facilities, which are exempt. There are so few probers that it would take more than 150 years to inspect every workplace in the U.S. once.
“Workers face extreme heat without water, rest, or shade. They are exposed to dangerous machinery and toxic chemicals. They experience wage theft and retaliation. In some cases, child labor and exploitative supply chains are used to cut costs and avoid responsibility,” the NACOSH report says.
“These conditions persist because enforcement is too weak to hold employers accountable or protect workers who speak up. Meanwhile, subcontracting, temporary staffing, and complex supply chains let companies shift responsibility while continuing to profit from unsafe conditions.”
Trump also is trashing labor protection standards. Martinez noted one he yanked is a proposed heat exposure limit. Accompanying the limit: Mandated simple ways, such as bathroom breaks, providing shade, and large amounts of water and other liquids, to prevent worker collapse and death.
One anonymous worker at one of the Dirty Dozen, Mississippi and Louisiana-based Consolidated Catfish, told of “stressed out people with heat strokes and many who lost limbs and fingers” to its machines inside a catfish plant. At others of the Dirty Dozen, here’s some of what workers confronted:
- “Hyundai and Kia, sister companies and among the world’s largest automakers, have a vast U.S. manufacturing network fueled by over $2.7 billion in public subsidies and rapid electric vehicle expansion in the South. But behind this growth is a supply chain linked to worker deaths, child labor, unsafe conditions, and systemic labor exploitation. Workers bear the burden of a model built on layers of subcontracting and temporary staffing agencies.” That lets suppliers cut labor costs and “Hyundai-Kia denies legal responsibility for workplace violations.”
- There are more U.S. Subway fast food stores than any other chain. “What is less visible is how its franchise model allows the company to distance itself from serious labor abuses” in local stores. Under the Biden administration, though the report doesn’t say so, Subway’s corporate headquarters and local franchises were jointly held responsible for breaking labor laws, including job safety laws. Trump’s DOL dumped that rule. So has his National Labor Relations Board.
“In California and beyond, [Subway] workers are speaking out about wage theft, unsafe working conditions, retaliation, and abuse—and demanding it stop,” NACOSH reports.
- Patricio Cambios, a building trades organizer with the Twin Cities-based Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha workers center, disclosed how the big homebuilder, D.R. Horton, stood aside and let Trump’ s violent and vicious ICE agents raid its home construction sites. Agents rounded up anyone with a brown skin, citizen or not, and with no warrants. Word got around, and only one worker on a homesite construction crew, out of 12, would show up.
Worse, Cambios said, was when ICE agents stood at the bottom of a home construction site, waiting for the roofers up top, all of them migrants, to come down. “They’re on the roofs in subzero weather, all in the middle of a Minnesota winter.” D.R. Horton was supposed to provide heaters for the workers in subfreezing conditions. It didn’t. “That showed D.R. Horton is on the side of the oppressor.”
- “Hearthside Food Solutions, recently renamed Maker’s Pride, has a long and troubling history of failing to protect workers from serious hazards, particularly machine dangers that too often resulted in amputations…But there’s more. The company failed to control unlawful placement of migrant children in hazardous factory jobs where they made and packaged popular cereals and snack foods.”
A Hearthside worker, speaking anonymously for fear of company retaliation, described difficult worker safety conditions inside its London, Ky., plant, which the Bakery Workers tried to unionize last year. The workers must handle frozen products on a factory line at ever-increasing speeds for eight hours straight, she said. “It goes too fast, and your hands start to get numb.
“At the end of the day, production matters” to the company. “Some people don’t go to the bathroom. And people developed muscle pain and arthritis. But they’re afraid to miss work…Many people considered leaving, but they stay because the salary is a little more than at other industrial plants. But nobody wants to work to kill yourself.”
The union lost a recognition election at the London, Ky., plant in September, but NLRB Administrative Law Judge Arthur Amchan threw the vote out because of massive worker rights violations by the firm, and ordered a rerun. Union President Anthony Shelton vowed to have his union keep fighting for the workers, but the woman worker said there is no evidence of a new campaign yet.
- “For years, workers told LSG Sky Chefs that Phoenix’s extreme summer heat exposes them to life-threatening risks. Despite these warnings and despite a city ordinance requiring heat protections for employees of city contractors, the company failed to ensure safe working conditions for the drivers who deliver food to aircraft and service planes on the tarmac.”
- Southern-based “Common Spirit Health is one of the nation’s largest health systems. The company says its mission is to ‘advance social justice for all,’” says NACOSH. “But across a number of its hospitals, nurses report unsafe staffing, workplace violence, wage theft, and aggressive anti-union tactics that undermine both worker safety and patient care.”
“The companies in this report are not outliers,” NACOSH stated. “They reflect a broader reality. Workers continue to face increased risks on the job while protection and enforcement fall short.”
The Consolidated Catfish worker best summed up what workers often face on the job.
“We’re here to make a living,” he said. “But not to be killed trying to make a living.”
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