'They killed my son.' One father fights for safety in the workplace.

• Author: Hayes, Ron
• Position: Cover Story

Friday, October 22, 1993, began like a hundred Fridays before it. It was the last day of my workweek, I was in a job I loved, and I had a great family. I even had a special treat that day: lunch with my wife. But this Friday was the day that ruined my life. At 1:30 P.M., I got the call that every parent dreads: a cold, hard voice said, "Mr. Hayes, your son Pat has been killed." These words still echo in my mind a thousand times a day.

It became a day of firsts: the first time I would identify my child's body; the first time I would search for the words to tell our other children what had happened; the first time I would pick out a casket. This task was so hard, but the hardest part of all came on Monday, when we had to close the casket forever. I held on as long as I could with five or six men pulling against me, but it was inevitable. I had to close the top and send my son's body away forever. No more touching; no more hugging; no more kissing. He was gone.

What makes it all even more unbearable is the needless nature of his death. Pat was killed on the job because the company he worked for didn't bother to provide a safe workplace, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) didn't have the will or the resources to insist that the company do so.

Pat was nineteen years old. He went to work that morning looking forward to a weekend of doing what he loved most, hunting, but this was not to be. He worked for the Showell Farms Chicken Processing Plant in De Funiak Springs, Florida, for $5 an hour. His supervisors told him to go into the corn silo and start scraping the kernels off the side of the bin, while an augur at the bottom sucked the corn down. This dangerous procedure, called "walking the corn," is against the law. Company officials knew it was life-threatening; still they sent their employees in on a daily basis without proper training or safety equipment. According to one company official, "Showell Farms operates under the rollof-the-dice philosophy; we won't change our ways until something bad happens."

Well, something bad happened to my son Pat. He was smothered under sixty tons of corn kernels. He died at 10:05 A.M., but because the company didn't have an emergency-action plan, as required by law, it took rescue workers five-and-a-half hours to recover his body. His face was so contorted in pain, you could see two tear streaks down his cheeks.

Showell Farms was no stranger to OSHA. Over the preceding eighteen...