WASHINGTON—If you want to have a better chance of coming home from work alive, pick some place other than Wyoming which comes up again in an AFL-CIO annual report as the poorest protector of worker lives in the nation.
Since at least 2018, according to the AFL-CIO’s annual Death on the Job report, deep-red Wyoming has led the country in the rate of deaths on the job, with double-digit death rates per 100,000 workers every year.
But in 2023, the last year the report covers, Wyoming jumped off the chart. There were 16 deaths per 100,000 Wyoming workers that year. Second-place West Virginia’s rate was 8.3/100,000, followed by Arkansas (7.5), Alaska (7.4) and Montana (7.1). Even for Wyoming, 16 is bad.
The national death rate was 3.5 deaths per 100,000 workers, a figure that’s held relatively steady for at least six years. Nationally, 5,283 workers died on the job in 2023, 203 fewer than the year before. That works out to 14 dead workers daily, but that figure is an understatement, as usual, the AFL-CIO said.
“This does not include workers who die from occupational diseases, estimated to be 135,304 each year,” the report, released ahead of Workers Memorial Day, April 28, explains.
Left out of the numbers, for example, are workers who died at home or in hospitals after suffering from coronavirus exposure at work. Left out are chronic occupational diseases—think black lung, which afflicts coal miners in particular—which kill workers either after years on the job or years later.
“Occupational illnesses often are misdiagnosed and poorly tracked,” the AFL-CIO noted. “There is no national comprehensive surveillance system for occupational illnesses. In total, 385 workers die each day due to job injuries and illnesses,” the report calculates.
Did not delve into record
The report did not delve into why Wyoming’s record has been so bad for so long, but several factors stand out. One is that it’s a big state in size, with only six safety and health inspectors. It would take them 307 years to get to each Wyoming workplace. That’s not the worst mark in the country. Louisiana’s eight inspectors would need 484 years.
Nationwide, state and federal job safety and health agencies are so understaffed that it would take all the inspectors 166 years to reach each workplace.
A second is that, like Alaska, Montana and West Virginia, Wyoming’s economy runs on extractive industries, principally oil and coal. So does Louisiana’s, dominated by offshore oil. Mining, quarrying and oil and gas have the second-highest industrial death rate, of 16.9 dead workers/100,000, ahead of only agriculture, fishing, forestry and hunting (20.3).
And Wyoming, Louisiana and Arkansas are all right-to-work-for-less states, where workers earn less and have less protection because of repression of unionizing, the report points out.
The horror of death on the job may get worse, the federation gloomily predicts. That’s because of the track record of its first term—not to mention the depredations of its current tenure so far—the Trump administration doesn’t really care. It may not even keep accurate data in these four years.
And from 2017-21, Trump’s prior reign, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration had a “no new rules” mandate from the White House, though it was never in writing. And during the pandemic, OSHA on-site inspections came to a halt. OSHA checked with firms by phone, fax, and email.
“Every worker has the fundamental right to come home safe at the end of their workday. But for too many workers, that basic right is under attack,” federation President Liz Shuler, an Electrical Worker, said in introducing the report.
“The Trump administration and DOGE”—multibillionaire Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency—”are gutting the federal agencies that hold bosses accountable for endangering workers” and “firing the federal workers who monitor and research health hazards.” DOGE just fired many researchers at the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health—despite the Auto Workers’ organizing drive there.
And Trump indicates he’ll “will repeal crucial worker safety regulations, and give billionaires like Musk the power to access and even manipulate OSHA whistleblower records,” Shuler warned.
“We can’t bring back the thousands of workers lost each year, but we can fight to prevent more devastation to working families…and demand the Trump administration reverse course.”
Federation Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond, a Steelworker, made the point that, again, workers of color suffer more than their white colleagues. “
As in every crisis, the crisis of worker mortality is hitting Black and Latino workers the hardest,” he said. The death rate for Black workers was 3.6/100,000 in 2023, while the rate for Latinos was 4.4/100,000. Both were down slightly from the year before, but above the national rate.
“It is unacceptable that employers are continuing to fail all workers, and especially Black and Latino workers, by not providing them the safety measures and resources they need to stay safe on the job. Enough is enough. The AFL-CIO is fighting the scourge of workplace mortality, and we will not rest until the number of workers who die on the job is zero,” Redmond declared.
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