Chanting “keep us safe, day and night” and “f— corporate greed,” several dozen steelworkers from the United States and Canada marched Downtown Friday to call for safer workplaces.
The United Steelworkers say federal funding cuts put health and safety standards at risk.
“Every single worker in this country deserves to have a safe, equitable workplace, and they deserve to come home,” said Bonnie Reese with USW Local 7687 in York, Pa.
She said proposed cuts to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration will affect every worker, whether their workplace is unionized or not.
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The Trump administration wants to cut funding to OSHA by $50 million for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1. That’s about 8% lower than this year. Labor groups say the agency tasked with ensuring safe working conditions is already under-resourced.
The march Friday from USW’s headquarters to a rally at Mellon Square Park was planned before an explosion Aug. 11 at U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works killed two workers and injured several others.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, whose district includes part of Allegheny County and all of Beaver County, joined the rally. He said the incident in Clairton is a terrible reminder that important work can be dangerous
Deluzio said a safe workplace is “not supposed to be some complicated thing that you need your congressman and you need to come together as a union to fight for — but we know that it is.”
Curtis Green of Local 1123 in Canton, Ohio, said the government has become “a complicit partner” in corporate greed by cutting OSHA.
“With fewer inspections and laughable fines, billion-dollar corporations are given the right to gamble with our lives,” Green said. “They know it’s cheaper to pay a tiny penalty for a dead worker than it is to install ventilation, to repair the faulty machines, to hire adequate staff that will keep us alive.”
If the government abandons its duty to protect workers, unions will fill the gap, Green said.
A recent report on workplace injuries and deaths from the AFL-CIO found that 5,283 workers were killed on the job in the United States in 2023. Employers reported nearly 3.2 million work-related injuries and illnesses, though the labor group said incidents are underreported.
The report said the Trump administration has “focused on totally decimating the fabric of what makes government protections work for people through attacks on job safety, public health, union rights and the independence of federal agencies.”
The proposed OSHA cuts could mean 10,000 fewer inspections in the next fiscal year than the previous year. The administration has also proposed eliminating the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, which investigates accidental chemical releases that cause serious injury or death. The board is investigating the explosion at the Clairton Coke Works.
USW on Friday said it is calling for the federal government to at least maintain current budget levels for OSHA and other safety agencies.
Even with efforts from the Biden administration to shore up worker protections, there are too few resources for enforcement and penalties are too weak to deter poor conditions, the AFL-CIO said. And now, the group said, years of progress are under attack.
The report found the overall job fatality rate fell in 2023 to 3.5 per 100,000 workers, down from 3.7 per 100,000 the year prior.
However, Black and Latino workers are more likely to die on the job than their white counterparts. The job fatality rate for Black workers was 3.6 per 100,000 workers, while the rate for Latinos was 4.4 per 100,000 workers. The report said two-thirds of Latino workers killed on the job were immigrants.
The report noted that heat is a rising concern for worker safety. At least 55 workers died from heat at work in 2023, a 28% increase from 2022, the report said.
The riskiest industries were agriculture and forestry; mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction; transportation and warehousing; and construction.
The USW said it represents 850,000 workers in metals, mining, pulp and paper, rubber, chemicals, glass, auto supply and the energy-producing industries.
