Across the country, people are skipping meals and falling behind on housing payments while layoffs, automation, and diminishing labor protections deepen insecurity. The message many workers hear is simple: You are replaceable.
Before joining National COSH earlier this year, COSHCON was something I had only heard about from afar. Working as a consultant in the NYC labor movement, I knew it was a respected, bilingual gathering that brought together workers, organizers, and health and safety leaders, but it was still just a concept to me, something other people experienced.
Silicosis is a lethal workplace illness that killed thousands each year up through the 1960s. In recent decades, thanks to union workplace safety fights, it became much rarer. Annual deaths dropped to the hundreds. The disease affected mostly older workers with longer exposures.
So it was hard for stonecutter Gustavo Reyes Gonzalez, 35, to get a clear diagnosis in 2019 when he first developed a cough and shortness of breath. It wasn’t until two years later that he was told he had silicosis—and only had a year to live.
Reyes Gonzalez had worked for 15 years in a fabrication shop cutting and shaping the manufactured stone now commonly used for countertops and showers (also known as quartz or engineered stone).
OSHA now has 20% fewer inspectors, and the number of willful violations issued has fallen by 42%. According to a report issued by Good Jobs First last December, wage and hour enforcement cases have declined by 97%, and workplace health and safety penalties have dropped 47%.
Consolidated Catfish was one of the 12 employers named in the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health’s annual “Dirty Dozen” list, released that day. They included D.R. Horton, the nation’s largest homebuilder; the Hyundai-Kia parts-supply chain; and two leading airport-support companies, Alliance Ground International and LSG Sky Chefs.
Hyundai, like most automakers, loves to be on lists. Safety awards, vehicle top-tens, sales champions, and any other list. Make that almost any list. Hyundai and its US supply chain have just been named to one list no company wants to be on. It comes from The National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH), a non-profit group which has some strong words regarding Hyundai Motor Group and its relationship with US employees.
The group has just named the Hyundai-Kia US supply chain to its Dirty Dozen list of "employers that put profit first and expose workers to harm" for alleged actions over the last decade. That's obviously a list Hyundai does not want to be on.
(WASHINGTON, D.C.) - A Worker dies from corporate negligence every 104 minutes: The suppliers of auto parts for Hyundai and Kia cars; The Subway Restaurant Chain; The Nation’s largest Homebuilder, which let Donald Trump’s vicious and violent ICE Agents raid its job sites; and a Snack Food Company that puts Migrants’ children into hazardous factory jobs.
“Workers are still being poisoned, injured, exploited and killed on the job. When employers say ‘the system is working,’ we have to ask: ‘Working for who?,’” says Jessica Martinez, the Executive Director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (NACOSH), which released its annual Dirty Dozen report on the worst job safety and health violators nominated by its local councils and allies, and why those corporate bad actors made the list - though they’re not alone.
