Workers stiffed: death and injury rates among America's workers soar, and the government has never cared less.

• Author: Freedman, Allan

On his best day, Stephen King couldn't have made this up: Homer Stull, a 20year-old kid working the graveyard shift in June 1991 at Liberal, Kansas's National Beef packing plant, died in a tank of cattle blood. He was cleaning a filter atop a 20-foothigh storage tank holding 27,000 gallons of the blood--a tank where something had gone seriously wrong several days before. The plant had lost electrical power, and deep in the vat, the bovine blood stagnated instead of circulating, releasing deadly hydrogen sulfide fumes. When Stull, oblivious to the danger, climbed up on the tank, the blood's fumes choked him. He died, retching on poisonous gas--as did two other workers trying to rescue him.

Oddly enough, this had all happened before. In 1983, three National Beef workers died in a similar way at the same tank in the same plant. Weird coincidence?

Actually, fortune had nothing to do with it. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)--the federal agency responsible for monitoring on-the-job safety--had simply failed, once again, to do its job. When the first trio of men died, OSHA fined National Beef $960--that's $320 a life--and asked that the cleaning routine be made safer. But after a single follow-up inspection in the wake of the first deaths, OSHA never came back to check if the new rules were being enforced.

The macabre case of National Beef underscores an equally macabre new trend, one endangering millions of American workers. Onthe-job injury rates--once on the decline--are now at their highest levels in a decade. The AFL-CIO estimates that 6 million workers are injured every year; 60,000 of those are permanently disabled. Though fatalities are down, 10,000 workers were killed on the job in 1990. That's about one Homer Stull every hour. To make matters worse, observers inside and outside OSHA say these death and injury figures may be underreported by as much as 50 percent. But nobody-- not OSHA, not the Department of Labor, not Congress--seems to care very much.

What's going on? OSHA's boilerplate defense is that it's understaffed and underfunded. That may be true, but at the same time, the agency hasn't really lobbied for more money. Its $300 million federal appropriation is laughable compared to the $1.1 billion earmarked to monitor fish and wildlife. The agency is supposed to keep tabs on 6 million workplaces with just 1,200 inspectors and 21 OSHA-approved state inspection programs. That means it can inspect individual employers once every 84 years, according to the AFL-CIO. And...