Too many Americans die on the job. Are things about to get worse?
US unions
Gabriel Winant
A US supreme court that is dominated by right-wing justices will have a devastating effect on worker’s rights and protections
Sun 19 Aug 2018 09.51 EDT
Who remembers Alphonse Maddin? Maddin came briefly to national attention in spring of 2017, after Donald Trump appointed Neil Gorsuch to the supreme court. Maddin was a truck driver and the central character in one of Gorsuch’s worst opinions as a circuit court judge. His story is one of the rare prominent examples of a vast, hidden world of American injustice: danger in the workplace.
Maddin was driving a truckload of meat across the Illinois prairie in the winter of 2009 when the brakes on the trailer of his vehicle froze. As he waited for his company’s road service to come fix the trailer brakes, he found that the heat in the truck’s cab was also broken. Maddin fell asleep in the sub-zero temperature, and when he woke up several hours later, the road service had not yet arrived. Parts of his body were going numb, his speech was slurred, and the company told him only to “hang in there”. So Maddin unhitched the immobilized trailer from the still-drivable cab of the truck and drove to safety. Although he soon returned to pick up the cargo and complete the job, his employer, TransAm, still fired him, and Maddin sued.
While the other two judges on the panel ruled in Maddin’s favor, the future supreme court justice dissented. The statute, Gorsuch pointed out, only protects workers who refuse to operate equipment out of safety concerns. By unhitching the trailer and driving the cab away, Maddin hadn’t refused to operate the equipment, but had rather hijacked it for his own purposes – however sympathetic those purposes might be. “Imagine a boss telling an employee he may either ‘operate’ an office computer as directed or ‘refuse to operate’ that computer,” wrote Gorsuch. “What serious employee would take that as license to use an office computer not for work but to compose the great American novel? Good luck.”
Maddin won his case, but it’s Gorsuch’s world we’re living in. According to an AFL-CIO report, 5,190 workers died on the job in the United States in 2016. Another 50,000 to 60,000 die annually of occupational diseases, and nearly 4 million experienced work-related injuries or illnesses. This latter figure, according to the report, is a drastic underestimate, with the real figure likely between 7.4 million and 11.1 million injuries and illnesses per year.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/19/worker-injury-workplace-danger-neil-gorsuch
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