(The following article is from the April 16-30, 2008 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St. Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3).

Special to PV

Is your job worth your life, or a serious disease or injury? That's a question many workers have to ask every day. The International Labour Organization reports that 2.2 million workers were killed in 2005 by occupational accidents and work-related diseases. Another 270 million suffered non-fatal accidents, and 160 million were hit with occupational diseases.

     Deaths and injuries take a particularly heavy toll in developing countries, where large numbers of workers are concentrated in the most hazardous industries - primary and extractive activities such as agriculture, logging, fishing and mining. Fatality rates in some European countries are twice as high as in some others, and in parts of the Middle East and Asia fatality rates soar to four-fold those in the industrialized countries. Certain hazardous jobs can be from 10 to 100 times riskier. Only 10 per cent or less of the workforce in many developing countries enjoy any sort of coverage against occupational injury and illness, and even in some OPEC countries coverage may extend to only half the workforce.

     Since 1984, April 28 has been marked in Canada as the Day of Mourning for Workers killed on the job. The annual event is now officially recognized in dozens of other countries, but the world-wide death toll continues.

     There are about one million workplace injuries a year in Canada, one every seven seconds of each working day. Over a thousand Canadian workers die on the job every year. Sadly, many work-related deaths do not appear in the official statistics, because they were not accepted as such by Workers Compensation Boards, or resulted from occupational diseases not yet recognized as having roots in the workplace.

     According to the Centre for the Study of Living Standards, in 2005 there were 1097 workplace deaths in Canada, up from 744 in 1984. The most dangerous area was the Northwest Territories, which recorded 27.4 deaths per 100,000 workers. Newfoundland and Labrador was second, at 11.7 deaths per 100,000 workers, followed by B.C. (8.9), Alberta (8.0), and Ontario (6.5).

     In Canada, men are 30 times more likely to die on the job than women. In 2005, the incidence was 12.4 deaths per 100,000 male workers, versus 0.4 deaths per 100,000 women. Contrary to common belief, older workers are more likely to die on the job. In 2005, the work-related fatality rate was 1.8 deaths per 100,000 workers for the 15-19 age group, but 18.1 deaths per 100,000 aged 60-64.

     The story is similar south of the border, where on average, 16 workers were fatally injured and more than 12,000 workers were injured or made ill each day of 2005. Again, these U.S. statistics do not include deaths from occupational diseases, which claim the lives of an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 workers each year.

     According to the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics, there were 5,734 workplace deaths due to traumatic injuries in 2005, a slight decrease from 2004. The rate of fatal injuries was 4.0 per 100,000 workers. Wyoming led the United States with the highest fatality rate (16.8 per 100,000), followed by Montana (10.3), Mississippi (8.9), Alaska (8.2), South Dakota (7.5) and South Carolina (6.7).

     The U.S. construction sector had the largest number of fatal work injuries (1,192) in 2005, followed by transportation and warehousing (885). Industry sectors with the highest fatality rates were agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting (32.5 per 100,000), mining (25.6) and transportation and warehousing (17.7).

     There is also a racist edge to the U.S. statistics. The rate of fatal injuries to Hispanic or Latino workers was 4.9 per 100,000 in 2005, or 23 percent higher than the fatal injury rate for all U.S. workers. Groups experiencing an increase in fatalities in 2005 included African-Americans and Native Americans.

     The International Labour Organization Workplace Fatality database shows that in 2003 Canada had the fifth highest incidence of workplace fatalities out of 29 OECD countries. Only Korea, Mexico, Portugal, and Turkey had workplace fatality higher rates.

     Unfortunately, definitions of workplace fatalities differ from country to country, and the ILO makes no attempt to standardize the data. Some countries exclude deaths from traffic accidents while on the job and deaths from occupational diseases in their estimates, so the ILO statistics should be used with caution. For example, unlike Canada, the U.S. definition excludes fatalities from occupational diseases.

     In fact, the ILO's 17th World Congress on Safety and Health at Work concluded that the organization's estimate of 2.2 million fatalities may be vastly under-estimated due to poor reporting and coverage systems in many countries.

     The most recent statistics available to the ILO state that India reports about 220 fatal accidents annually, while the Czech Republic, which has a working population of about 1 per cent of India, reports 231. The ILO estimates the true number of fatal accidents in India at about 40,000 per year.

     "Occupational safety and health is vital to the dignity of work", said ILO Director-General Juan Somavia. "Still, every day, on average, some 5,000 or more women and men around the world lose their lives because of work-related accidents and illness. Decent work must be safe work, and we are a long way from achieving that goal."

     The ILO report Decent Work - Safe Work, presented at the Congress, warned that work-related malaria and other communicable diseases as well as cancers caused by hazardous substances are taking a huge toll, mostly in the developing world.

     While men are more at risk of dying at working age (below 65), women suffer more from work-related communicable diseases, psycho-social factors and long-term musculo-skeletal disorders.

     Hazardous substances are perhaps the most troubling factor world-wide, causing an estimated 440,000 deaths each year. Of these, asbestos alone kills some 100,000 workers. In Britain, 3,500 workers die from the effects of asbestos every year, more than ten times the number of workers killed in accidents.

     The report noted that emerging problems such as psychosocial factors, violence, the effects of alcohol and drugs, stress, smoking and HIV/AIDS are rapidly leading to increased fatalities worldwide. Smoking, which affects mostly workers in the restaurant, entertainment and service sectors, is estimated to cause 14 per cent of all work-related deaths caused by disease, or close to 200,000 fatalities. The ILO also estimated that the cumulative loss of labour force participants due to HIV/AIDS since the start of the epidemic had reached 28 million worldwide by 2005.

     These statistics are often accompanied by recommendations to improve workplace safety, such as better monitoring by governments, closer cooperation between unions and employers, higher training requirements, and so on.

     But these well-meaning proposals avoid the root of the problem: each such reform impedes the "right" of corporations to extract maximum profits from their workers. A key part of the neoliberal policy agenda imposed by capital, with the enthusiastic support of right-wing governments (and even social democratic parties in office) has been to remove such restrictions. In many jurisdictions, the monitoring of labour and safety standards has been drastically cut back, or even replaced by "voluntary" industry compliance.

     Part of this trend is the "decline" in job-related injuries reported by Workers Compensation boards with little explanation. This reflects moves by employers to opt out of compensation coverage in favour of private insurers, which are usually more restrictive in granting claims.

     Another factor in the rise of work-related fatalities may be the increase in work hours and resulting stress and fatigue. Canada now ranks fourth in the world in the number of hours worked per capita per year; over one-quarter of Canadians report working over 50 hours per week, up from one-tenth in 1991.

     The bottom line is that over 1,000 Canadian workers are dying and one million are wounded every year, at a time when total corporate profits are well over $200 billion. Those profits are created by our labour. The bosses who reap the benefits should be forced to dramatically improve workplace health and safety - and that means raising taxes on corporate profits to pay for such changes, the sooner the better.