WASHINGTON—The Donald Trump regime has spent the first years-plus of his second presidential term trashing decades of progress in protecting workers’ safety and health on the job, the AFL-CIO says.
But a close reading of the federation’s 35th annual report of Death On The Job: A Toll Of Neglect, and especially its state-by-state figures, shows the problem is far deeper than one anti-worker government and the wreckage it’s producing at the 55-year-old Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
With Wyoming in the lead—again–the states where workers are most likely to die on the job are all heavily dependent on fossil fuel firms and facilities: Coal mines, oil derricks, natural gas wells, and offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
“Trump’s Department of Labor is making it easier every day for billionaire CEOs and corporations to dodge their obligations to workers, shifting agencies from enforcing the law and holding employers accountable to promoting ‘self-audit’ programs for employers,” federation President Liz Shuler said.
“Every worker should be able to go home safe and healthy at the end of their shift, but 55 years after the founding of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, that fundamental right is in danger,” Shuler warned.
“From the dismantling of critical federal agencies and laws to the expansion of unregulated, untested artificial intelligence technology, the protections workers fought and died for are under serious threat.”
Trump “stopped conducting Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) impact inspections, proposed to eliminate critical research from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, attempted to remove dozens of OSHA and MSHA standards from the books, and moved to dismantle the regulatory process,” the federation said in a statement.
“More than five decades after a Republican,” Richard Nixon, “signed the landmark Occupational Safety and Health Act into law, we urge all members of Congress—from both sides of the aisle—to join us in this fight,” Shuler, an Electrical Worker, concluded.
“It is a disgrace that in 2026, being Black, Latino, or an immigrant can still be a death sentence on the jobsite,” added AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond, a Steelworker. Death On The Job “makes it terrifyingly clear that the Trump administration’s anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion, mass deportation agenda will only make this crisis worse.
“When workers are afraid that reporting threats to their safety could result in their work permits being revoked and their families being ripped apart, and when employers fear reporting workplace data will hurt their bottom line, we are all less safe: Workers of color and white workers, immigrant workers and U.S.-born workers.
“We must fight the Trump administration’s attacks on communities of color like our fellow workers’ lives are on the line—because they are.”
The report did not cover, except by implication in Shuler’s statement, how corporate chieftains, especially from fossil fuel industries, influence job safety and health enforcement, or lack of it. Trump’s infamous dinner with fossil fuel barons at his Mar-a-Lago estate during the 2024 campaign symbolizes that clout. And the corporate class has always hated OSHA, with a vengeance.
Trump promised the executives complete deregulation, plus more tax cuts for the rich, if they would contribute a billion dollars to his presidential drive. His so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” delivered on the tax cuts–while decimating the fossil fuel firms’ competition in wind and solar power.
The federation issued the report a day in advance of Workers Memorial Day, April 28. Using the latest available federal figures for calendar 2024, it reports 5,070 workers died on the job that year, and the national death rate was 3.3/100,000 workers.
But the data, along with data for on-the-job injuries and injury rates–which are also in the report–are underestimates. The federal figures only count immediate deaths on the job, not those related to toxic exposures retired workers contracted over their working lives, such as coal miners dying of black lung disease years after they retired. Those deaths totaled 135,000 in 2024, the report calculates.
Independent studies in past years, comparing workers’ comp data, state by state, and state reports of job-related deaths, showed undercounts in the federal figures. And the Occupational Safety and Health Act does not cover 7.9 million state and local government workers, including 1.8 million in Texas and 946,000 in Florida, the two most populous right-wing Republican-run states.
The federal figures also omit deaths from the coronavirus, even though that plague, during Trump’s first term, saw significant occupational exposure via infected workers forced to toil on the job and exposing colleagues and customers. When Democratic President Joe Biden’s OSHA tried to use the law’s general duty clause to regulate those exposures, the Supreme Court—at corporate behest—beat him.
Open-pit strip coal mining and forests of oil derricks signify the predominance of fossil fuel industries in Wyoming, which had a death rate of 13.9/100,000 workers in 2024. Wyoming has finished with the highest death rate in the five years the report covers. Its 2024 death rate was an improvement over 2023 (16/100,000). The 2024 national death rate for oil and gas workers was 13.8/100,000.
Fossil fuel-producing states dominate the bottom 10 on the 2024 death rate list. Behind Wyoming are Mississippi (49th, 8 deaths/100,000 workers), Alaska (48th, 7.1/100,000 workers), North Dakota (47th, 6.8/100,000), Arkansas (46th, 6.2/100,000), Montana, West Virginia and South Dakota (tied at 43rd, 5.8/100,000), Iowa (42nd, 5.2/100,000) and Louisiana and Tennessee (tied for 40th, 5.1/100,000).
Meanwhile, the Trump regime is ripping away workers’ job safety and health protections and cutting OSHA’s budget and personnel. There are now only five federal and/or state job safety and health inspectors per million workers, according to Death On The Job reports. That’s the lowest level in 45 years, and it would take 181 years for OSHA to visit all workplaces in the U.S.
And that doesn’t take into account Trump’s proposed budget for the fiscal year starting October 1. He’d cut OSHA alone by $50 million, to $582 million, and job safety, health, and workplace wage and hour enforcement overall by $234 million.
The report closes with many recommendations for Congress and some for worker safety and health agencies, including OSHA, MSHA, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which handles toxic chemical exposures, or is supposed to do so. Recommendations include:
- “Put the critical need to protect workers’ health and safety above billionaire and corporate motives,” and “reject attempts by corporations to weaken broad regulatory frameworks under the guise of ‘reform’ that actually would make it more difficult—or impossible—for agencies to issue needed safeguards.”
- “Support and reinstate appointees at independent labor agencies wrongfully fired or displaced as part of a broad attack on labor unions and worker rights.”
Most of EPA’s scientists have been sidelined or let go, and the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, which performs research on job safety and health hazards, was decimated by multibillionaire Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. A federal court order revived it.
- “Oppose any continued efforts to weaken or destabilize worker health and safety agencies, including NIOSH, OSHA, MSHA, EPA, and the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, and support full accountability to ensure these agencies can carry out the responsibilities” Congress assigned.
- Increase, not cut, job safety and health agency spending and staffing. OSHA and state OSHAs combined had 1,953 inspectors in 1991. They have 1,651 now, though the U.S. workforce they must cover has grown by 45%.
- Pass legislation to force OSHA to write specific standards mandating bosses take active measures to curb heat-related deaths—which totaled 524 in 2024, a high proportion of them Latinos—and workplace violence. That violence extends to deaths and injuries, primarily of nurses, in medical facilities, a key cause of National Nurses United.
- Increase enforcement, and not “voluntary” programs, a common GOP tactic to let employers off the hook and put the burden of workplace safety and health problem prevention on the workers. The law puts that responsibility on the bosses.
There are also legislative proposals, by congressional Democrats, to increase OSHA’s notoriously low fines. The report shows California’s state OSHA program levied the highest average penalty, $9,281, for “serious” OSHA violations in fiscal 2025, which ended Sept. 30, 2025. Maryland had the lowest average, $987. Fines for “willful” violators and fines levied on repeat violators are higher.
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