Nick Revetta was killed in an explosion after a gas leak. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigated, but issued no citation and paid no fine.
Communication tower climbing, which only employs ten thousand people at any time, has resulted in 100 deaths over the last nine years, a death rate ten times higher than construction. Not a single tower climber fatality is listed under the major cell phone companies’ entries in OSHA’s database of workplace accident investigations.
This is not okay.
Workers have the right to a safe and healthy workplace; they should not die because of their job. But for far too many people– mostly men, nearly all blue-collar– work results in death.
The culprits are exactly what one would expect. For instance, the communication tower climbers often receive crap equipment and little training; to satisfy unrealistic work quotas, they work overnight and in dangerous conditions. Because they work for contractors and not directly for the phone companies, the phone companies experience no negative consequences whatsoever from the deaths of the communication tower climbers– even though they directly cause them. OSHA is perpetually understaffed and under pressure to complete dozens of inspections, even at the risk of leaving workers in unsafe conditions and not penalizing people for the work they do.
Some of the reason behind this is that our culture doesn’t care about poor people as much as it cares about corporate profits. Who cares if people die? We have our 3G networks and our steel! That’s the important bit, right? It might cut down on the sacred profit if we make sure to protect the safety of manual workers! And if we funded OSHA enough, then we might not be able to fund tax breaks for rich people and drones to go kill brown men in other countries. Those are so much more important. And, besides, who really cares about manual laborers anyway? It’s not like they’re people. It’s not like they matter the way rich people do.
And let’s be honest here. OSHA is not, mostly, protecting white-collar workers. They’re not inspecting workplaces to make sure your chair is ergonomic and your computer doesn’t have too much glare, you know? They’re protecting factory workers and construction workers and communication tower climbers. If we underfund OSHA, we’re saying “fuck you, poor people, you should have had the foresight to be born to rich parents who could afford college!”
Men are disproportionately likely to die on the job. Some of it is that for a variety of reasons (men tend to have more physical strength than women, men are more likely to be hired as manual laborers, heavily-male environments are unwelcoming to women) manual labor is gendered very, very male, and manual labor is the sector most at risk for deaths on the job. Some of the reason is located in toxic ideas of masculinity. Men take risks. Men don’t care about their safety or health. Men will work dangerous jobs to take care of their family. Men aren’t “pussies.” And these corporations take advantage of these toxic ideas to cut costs and work faster and not have to take proper safety precautions.
Let me be clear here: this isn’t about anything those men are doing wrong. We need to fix the blame on the correct people: the corporations. They’re at best condoning and at worst actively coercing people into risk-taking and unsafe behavior that will, very often, result in them dying. This is fucking intersectionality for you. Combine fucked ideas of masculinity and fucked ideas of class, all for the benefit of the tiny percentage of people at the top.
Short version: when people talk about “intrusive regulations stifling businesses,” you should interpret that as “I really don’t care if poor men die as long as my stock holdings pay off.” That is what it means.
About ozyfrantz
Has it occurred to you that maybe they take risks due to circumstances? People generally don’t take risks because they want to and even less so because they’re told to. It’s pretty much always down to necessity.
Risk taking is also not necessarily a bad thing. Usually, taking risks is sensible when the odds are against you while it is not sensible if they’re with you. Given that our species has only had a minority of men procreate, this puts the odds against individual men which would explain their inclination towards more risky behavior. With women this was the other way round which might explain their relative risk aversion.
It is very likely that social constructs like the “male risk taker” are symptomatic or a consequence of the evolutionary pressure men are under. The history of our species is far older than any culture or social organization. So socialization, if anything, probably only reinforces rather than creates gender roles.
This means that, if we want to remove the imposition of gender roles, addressing socialization will not work unless we address the underlying causes. Otherwise men will simply replace one toxic gender role with another.
I would like to point that if there is any biological basis to a gender divide in risk-taking, it probably comes from thousands of years of breeding under the patriarchy. In other words, men were genetically selected to be risk-taking because the culture demanded it, not the other way around. At least initially. After awhile it would just become a feedback loop that exists because it creates itself. That’s, again, assuming that there actually is a significant biological component to it.
@Diesirae- ‘our species has only had a minority of men procreate’- I’m assuming with this you do not mean in the present day but in some distant, possibly prehistoric past. Either way, can you provide any evidence to support this statement? Personally, I would say that thousands of years of cultural influence in a society where men of any level of likelihood-of-risk-taking can and do procreate, any ideas of ‘natural selection’ and anything innate that might make men take more risks can be overidden by environmental factors, like society’s ideas of masculinity that men in our culture grow up with.
Seriously guys?
Men only have 60 extra genes that women don’t have, It is very hard to evolve a male only trait, or a female only trait. Things like penises and ovaries have evolved slowly over hundreds of millions of years…
With evolutionary biology language, you can make anything sound plausible.
What, no trigger warning?
This is how to close the wage gap and get better/safer working conditions. Get more women in these manual labor jobs. There shouldn’t be a disproportionate amount of men any more than there should be in Fortune 500 CEO offices. Let’s work at getting more women in these jobs.
OSHA would instantly ensure greater workplace safety and women’s incomes would increase.
Careful Eric…that’s feminism.
Hey, I’m all for equality, just not the selective kind. There are only 500 Fortune 500 CEO jobs, but thousands of these jobs. They are harder and expose workers to the elements BUT they would get a raise over the so-called “pink collar” jobs.
If the movement really wanted to advance women, they would give this clear direction:
1. If they aren’t going to university, go into either one of the trades or get technical training.
2. If they are going to university, study either business, STEM, or preferably both. Period. Nothing else. Cease and desist with English, Women’s Studies, Sociology, and all of that. If that happened, the wage gap would dramatically shrink in 10-15 years.
If I were in charge of feminism, that’s what I would be preaching from the rooftops, not this patriarchy, male privilege mumbo jumbo. That accomplishes nothing. No offense.
“If I were in charge of feminism, that’s what I would be preaching from the rooftops, not this patriarchy, male privilege mumbo jumbo. That accomplishes nothing. No offense.”
Firstly, no one is “in charge” of feminism. Secondly…there are PLENTY of people advocating for women to be more accepted in manual labour. The reason North Country with Charlize Theron was such an amazing movie was precisely because it was portraying women in manual labour and exploring the difficulties they face both from men and women who expect women to pursue more traditionally acceptable jobs. That is such a feminist movie.
And the thing is male privilege and patriarchy isn’t mumbo jumbo. It’s an interpretive framework and a way of explaining why women are discouraged from working in manual labour jobs. Male privilege and patriarchy, mixed in with a healthy dose of classism and our current form of capitalism.
Yeah it’s the part you don’t hear about too often. Or not nearly as much as the godzillionth post on why there aren’t more women CEOs.
As I was explaining, that’s largely a class-based thing. Our society values People In Charge more than it does so-called “unskilled workers,” regardless of whether they’re male or female.
I wasn’t so much trying to say it’s gender over class. Just making the observation of seeing how often talk of having more women CEOs comes up compared to talk of more women working on power lines. Being a class thing or not it’s coming from a movement that is supposedly about freeing things up for all walks of life.
I’m going into engineering in about a year or so, most likely working for a power company. I plan on making safe working conditions a high priority ’cause there’s no reason anyone should die trying to feed their family, and I really don’t want to feel like I’m responsible. Reading about workplace deaths is hard for me ’cause I know these deaths can be prevented, although it’s nice knowing that, in my position, I can see myself doing something to directly improve it.
You may find that there is some new wind in yoyur sails. Highly trained workers are valuable and not as disposable, in purley mercenary terms, than unskilled, easily rpelaceable people are. that[‘s especially true if the organization paid to train these people. but evenif they only hirealready trained people form outside, there is a finite supply of these people and they have to be taken care of. I am purposely putting this in dehumanizing terms, becaue those are the attitudes that drive business decisions. And even with that mentlaity, it makes bottom line sense to make workplaces safe. Usually.
“Men are disproportionately likely to die on the job. Some of it is that for a variety of reasons”
You missed a reason. Many blue collar/male-dominated work environments are also extremely hostile to women. Social science research consistently demonstrates that women in these types of jobs experience greater harassment than do women in professional occupations.
Men, MRAs, and gender egalitarians always bring up the “men die more” statistic, but they also quite often overlook the fact that it’s often men who are actively and aggressively working to keep women out of these Very Dangerous Occupations.
@ Fannie -”Many blue collar/male-dominated work environments are also extremely hostile to women”
That’s a fair observation and It’s compounded by the fact that businesses don’t want to go through all the legal and financial huddles necessarily to eliminate the “No Gurlz Allowed” mentality.
I’m left wondering if the market could stand a feminized coal mining work force, especially when hard working men are seen as too stoic to tell their supervisors about his lung cancer and lax safety concerns.
Fannie, my third reason in that parenthesis was that “heavily-male environments are unwelcoming to women.”
The difference between blue-collar and white-collar workers is interesting, though; I hadn’t read about that.
Men, MRAs, and gender egalitarians always bring up the “men die more” statistic, but they also quite often overlook the fact that it’s often men who are actively and aggressively working to keep women out of these Very Dangerous Occupations.
Actually that is the other side of the “men are expected to do the dangerous jobs” part of pointing out the problem is gender roles. As in “men are expected to do the dangerous jobs and women are kept away from them”. Setting up the idea that men are supposed to do that stuff and women are not supposed to do that stuff.
So no it doesn’t get overlooked as often as some want to think. And besides Ozy did bring it up.
“Many blue collar/male-dominated work environments are also extremely hostile to women.”
They are just plain hostile to any new workers, period. Men used ot fight, sometimes tot the death , over those jobs, because the relatively higher levels of pay made them very desirable.Check out the way white ethnic unions kept black men out of broad swathes of industrial jobs. Even less visible were the bars to (white) non-Catholics in many jobs.
And now even if that particular reason doens’t really apply anymore, the workplace culture has been set – tribalism and protectionism.
Also, as Danny says, jobs were allotted along gender lines. Look in the Jungle – all the worst jobs were male, because the owners knew they couoldn’t get away with subjecting women to those conditions, even fresh-off-the-boat eastern European immigrant women. There would have been an uproar. Note how in the packing house the women’s job was lacing casings onto hams, versus all the other jobs, like the killing floor and hacking the carcasses apart, and God forbid, the fertilizer plant.
Fannie writes:
“but they also quite often overlook the fact that it’s often men who are actively and aggressively working to keep women out of these Very Dangerous Occupations.”
Actually, my understanding is that it’s both sexes. I remember reading a magazine article about a mining town in which a small handful of women entered into mining positions. Some of these women’s biggest harassers were the wives of miners. I think these women were seeing their female privilege slip away.
What you have (in a lot of cases) is some women with their feet firmly stuck in 1950 (totally ok with being provided for totally by a man) fighting with women with their feet in today (they don’t want to rely on a man).
To say it’s all about men versus these courageous woman is a little bit of a simplification.
@Diesirae,
There is no evidence that only a minority of men have ever procreated. That “40%” statistic you’re undoubtedly familiar with comes from a misquote of Roy Baumeister when he was only posing a hypothetical.
@Mike,
I don’t agree with Diesirae, but statements like yours aren’t helping. Saying that “only 60 genes separate men from women” (I’m not sure on the exact count myself) is like saying only two letters separate ‘burger’ from ‘murder’. Genes are like letters. Most of them have multiple functions, most of which involve being involved in complex regulatory cascades involving multiple genome elements that geneticists have barely begun to understand. The idea that one gene does one thing (i.e. codes one protein) is hopelessly outdated and reductive, and the examples we’re taught in school that were like that were chosen precisely because they’re so exceptionally simple. (Such as that damn lactase gene in E. Coli, which should be remembered is a bacterium, so already much, much simpler than we are.) Might I remind you how few genes separate humans from chimps.
@HeatherN,
And crime, mass incarceration, etc. are class issues, not racial ones, because they affect the poor, whether black or white. Therefore racial analyses are less valid.
Seriously, feminists sound like white people who complain “but it’s a claaaaass issue, not a race issue”, whenever they are faced with an undeniable example of men suffering. Something can be both a class issue and a race issue. This can be both a gender issue and a class issue. Gender-based discussion and gender-based critique and gender-based solutions to this are all not only warranted but necessary. Class-based ones are, too, but they’re not the only ones allowed. Is it that hard to just admit when some men have it bad? Yeesh.
@the OP,
OSHA needs to be staffed by former hard laborers themselves who’ve managed to move themselves up to desk positions. As it stands now, a lot of people in charge of labor in America, if told to shovel, would probably start by using the wrong end. That’s not even getting into decades of underfunding and undercutting from Republicans in power.