Workers Who Died from the Infection Remain Invisible to the Government
By
Good news! Fake news? According to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, the year 2020 also known as the year of Covid was a great year for
worker safety.
Sophia Foster-Dimino
2020 Census of Fatal
Occupational Injuries (CFOI) data released Thursday show,
“There were 4,764 fatal work injuries recorded in the United States in 2020, a
10.7% decrease from 5,333 in 2019.” That’s the lowest number since 2013!
And
if you only read the first few paragraphs and charts, you’d actually believe
that 2020 a great year for workers; time to declare victory and go home.
But
not so fast. Recork the champagne. One detail the bureau failed to examine — a
failure only mentioned below the main headlines at the bottom of the first page
of the press release — was worker deaths due to Covid.
According
to the bureau :
CFOI
reports fatal workplace injuries only. These may include fatal workplace
injuries complicated by an illness such as Covid. Fatal workplace illnesses not
precipitated by an injury are not in scope for CFOI. CFOI does not report any
illness-related information, including Covid.
That
means if you were so sick with Covid that you got dizzy and fell off a ladder,
your death was counted. Otherwise, you don’t count.
Removing
the bureaucratese, what we are viewing here is a tragedy laid upon a tragedy:
The thousands of workers who died bravely working through the greatest pandemic
in American history are essentially invisible.
Why Do the Numbers Look Low
So
why were the workplace fatality numbers down? There was little work in
2020.
There
were far fewer workers working in the most dangerous occupations such as
construction and transportation. As I predicted last
month when bureau released its report on occupational injuries and illnesses
due to Covid-related shutterings, “It is highly likely that for the first time
in many years, the bureau will report a decrease in
work-related deaths.
“Despite
the fact that more work-related deaths occurred in 2020 than any year in recent
U.S. history, most Covid-related workplace deaths will be officially invisible.”
Of
course, essential workers doing the most dangerous jobs during the height of
the pandemic before vaccines arrived were not so lucky.
The
rate for Hispanic workers went up from 4.2 deaths per 100,000 full-time
equivalent workers in 2019 to 4.5 in 2020. The share of Hispanic or
Latino workers killed on the job also continued to grow, increasing to 22.5% in
2020 from 20.4% in 2019.
How Many Workers Died and Where? Who Knows?
We
have very little information on how many workers died of work-related Covid
infections in most occupations. The ones with the best numbers are in health
care and meatpacking.
Healthcare Workers
We
have a more accurate idea of how many healthcare workers died from Covid than
any other occupation, but even these numbers are grossly incomplete. The
Center for Disease Control reports a total of 3,031 healthcare workers died of Covid since
the beginning of the pandemic. But it admits that death status is available for
less than two-thirds of total reported cases. The extent of the undercount can
be seen by the fact that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service, which
requires staff and resident case and fatality reporting from long-term nursing
care establishments, reports that 2157 Covid-related deaths just among staff in establishments that receive
Medicare or Medicaid funding.
The
2,157 is from the beginning of Covid until this month. In 2020, the
government reported around 1,300 deaths of long-term care staff. Had those been
counted, they would have reflected over 27% of total workplace deaths for 2020.
Meatpacking Workers
A
recent report by the
House Select Sub-Committee on the
Corona Virus Crisis last month referenced documents on five of
the largest meatpacking conglomerates. The firms represent over 80 percent of
the market for beef and over 60 percent of the market for pork in the United
States:
- JBS USA Food Company (JBS)
- Tyson Foods Inc. (Tyson)
- Smithfield Foods (Smithfield)
- Cargill Meat Solutions Corp. (Cargill)
- National Beef Packing Co. LLC (National Beef)
The
documents say, during the first year of the pandemic, at least 59,000 employees
of these five meatpacking companies contracted Covid
That’s
almost triple the 22,700 infections previously estimated for these companies.
At least 269 of these companies’ employees died.
According
to testimony from
Debbie Berkowitz, a fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative
for Labor and the Working Poor and a former senior official at OSHA during the
Obama administration:
“More
workers have died from COVID-19 in the last 18 months in the meat and poultry
industry than died from all work-related causes in the industry in the last 15
years.”
What We Don’t Know Is Hurting Us
The labor bureau is correct within the narrow confines of what CFOI is supposed to do: Count workplace injuries only), disease-related deaths—including those from Covid—are invisible. We often cite BLS in claiming that 14 workers are killed in the job every day—5,333 in 2019.
That’s a lot, but the
total number of work-related deaths included diseases caused by chemicals like
asbestos, silica, various solvents and other communicable diseases, are likely
20 times that number.
The
AFL-CIO notes in its annual Death on the Job report
that most chronic workplace illness-related deaths are not detected until years
after workers have been exposed to toxic chemicals and because occupational
illnesses often are misdiagnosed and poorly tracked. There is no national
comprehensive surveillance system for occupational illnesses. In total, about
275 workers die each day due to job injuries and illnesses.
There
is no doubt that we are now experiencing the greatest workplace death toll in
modern American history due to Covid. We have much to learn about the
real extent of that toll and how to prevent these deaths—not only for this
pandemic but for those yet to come.
Nevertheless,
it’s nothing short of criminal that neither the labor bureau nor the CDC have
any process for assessing the impact of Covid. There is no plan to develop such
a system.
The
failure of the labor bureau include any Covid-related deaths—as well as the
reason that workplace deaths decreased last year—should have been in the first
paragraph of the first page, not the last.
This
lack of information is doing real damage already. OSHA standards to protect
workers have been beaten down (except for healthcare workers) largely due to
political pressure.
Even
vaccine/testing mandates and other worker protection requirements are losing in
court, largely due to the lack of good data on the extent to which Covid strain
has been transmitted at work.
There
is language in the FY 2022 House Appropriations Report that would require CDC
to study the impact of Covid on workers, including disparate impact by race and
ethnicity. Passage would be a major step forward.
Otherwise,
the workers of this country—many of whom risked their lives going to work every
day during the height of the pandemic—are facing a national failure to learn
the lessons of this pandemic. These lessons could save thousands of workers’
lives when the next pandemic—or the next variant—hits.
Jordan Barab was
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor at OSHA from 2009 to 2017, and spent 16
years running the safety and health program at the American Federation of
State, County and Municipal Employees. He writes regularly at
https://jordanbarab.com/confinedspace/