Jill James:

This is the Accidental Safety Pro brought to you by HSI. This episode was recorded May 17th 2022. My name is Jill James, HSI's chief safety officer and today my guest is Rebecca Reindel who is the safety and health director at the AFL-CIO. The AFL-CIO, which stands for the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, is the largest labor federation in the United States, representing 57 national and international labor unions with 12.5 million union members nationwide. Recently, I read a report they published each year and the report is titled Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect, 2022.

Jill James:

The report is a treasure trove of data for our current times. You can find it on their website and is one of the reasons I reached out and asked Rebecca to be our guest. Rebecca is joining us today from Washington, DC. Rebecca, thank you so much and welcome to the show.

Rebecca Reindel

Thank you so much for having me.

Jill James:

Yeah, you're welcome. So Rebecca, let's jump right in and start with your story first, we can get to know you a little bit better. Tell us about your winding journey to this work and start wherever you'd like from the way back machine from your family of origin and go along as you'd like.

Rebecca Reindel

Well, thank you. It's really a real pleasure to be here and very fitting to the title of your podcast. It's accidental how I got where I am, I believe, probably like so many other folks. I grew up in a working class union family in Cleveland, Ohio. My father worked in the steel mills as a union welder and pipe fitter and my mother held various jobs with the hospital and working for the city while raising us. And I remember going with my mother to drop my dad off in the steel mills, driving through the noisy and dirty environment and I remember him getting his regular safety certifications and taking classes. And I also remember being very civically active with my mother who had a very big drive for public service and we attended community meetings to get new lampposts on the street and the food drive, city election campaigns and all of that.

Rebecca Reindel

So that's the kind of background I grew up in which ended up being very fitting to what I do now, but it's not actually how I ended up in the field of occupational safety and health.

Jill James:

Yeah, tell us more.

Rebecca Reindel

Sure. My brothers and I were first generation college and our family and that was thanks to our parents who really wanted us to have an education and I benefited from union scholarship along the way. I was also just very interested in science, and now, what I know now as social justice. But they never really emerged in a meaningful way for me until much later I was in college, I really nerded out on biology and research, scientific method, writing up findings, discovering new things. And you really can apply the love of science in so many ways and my undergraduate thesis was actually on blowflies. They're an insect which can help determine the time of death when people die.

Rebecca Reindel

And so I was into this forensic toxicology mode and I interned one summer in my county coroner's office. I was very interested in pursuing forensic pathology, forensic toxicology. I had some options on the table in medicine and other things. I pursued a master's in forensic toxicology and I was just following what I really liked to do and worked in a laboratory for a while doing that while I was in school. But yeah, but then as I went through college and graduate school, I really wanted to find a more direct way to focus my real science interests with improving people's lives.

Rebecca Reindel

And with social justice and with a policy application, which I didn't really realize was called policy at the time and really realizing I wanted to focus on prevention rather than later down the line, but I also participate in a lot of community service programs. So while all this was happening while I was studying science, my senior year of college, I became an American Corps volunteer where I lived in something called The Mother Jones House and it was an intentional service community in Wheeling, West Virginia where I went to school and Mother Jones was an incredible force, a labor leader, leading the minor strikes back in the day and-

Jill James:

Right, right, right. You said Mother Jones. The first quote that comes to mind is, "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living."

Rebecca Reindel

Exactly. And when we have Workers' Memorial Day every year at the end of April, the theme really is mourn for the dead, fight for the living and is centered around the work we do now which is I started the Mother Jones poster in my office and think so much about those days.

Jill James:

Wow.

Rebecca Reindel

Yeah, it's interesting, but the context was always there. It was always floating around me. I just didn't really know how to merge it and so the combination of all of it was really why I transitioned after my forensic toxicology studies to a master's in public health and I wanted to focus that toxicology knowledge and exposure knowledge on environmental and occupational health. And it felt like a very natural place to put my skills and my interest to use and-

Jill James:

And how did you figure out that occupational health was even a thing? Was it from working in The Mother Jones House?

Rebecca Reindel

It wasn't. I had done some reading, but it really wasn't until that master's program that I was more emerged into it and I did this really incredible summer internship program called OHIP, the Occupational Health Internship Program. And that's really what narrowed it into a lane for me that said, "Oh, no, I want to prevent workplace exposures. That's it.

Jill James:

Wow. And so as you talk about this internship program with OHIP, you all should just find what that stands for, but is that something that's still alive today?

Rebecca Reindel

Absolutely. So OHIP started in 2004. It was modeled after an internship that started back in the '70s and '80s by a guy called Tony Mazzocchi. And in New York, Tony had student interns whom investigate health and safety problems, but he knew that the best way to do that was really merging communities and public health folks with workers and labor unions. And so you had them do the summer internships and many of the former interns have actually become leading occupational environmental health experts who we know of today and who have been merged with that program. So Tony laid the groundwork. Tony passed in the early 2000s. I think there was a group of experts in the field that said, "We need a new generation of occupational, environmental or occupational health and safety professionals."

Rebecca Reindel

And this program started in 2004 and it were, I think ... So what is that? That's almost 20 years that the program is going on and it's an incredibly immersive program that prepares students to investigate health and safety hazards with unions of worker centers throughout a summer.

Jill James:

Oh, wow. So people who are listening, if you're just starting out in your career or maybe you're mentoring someone and trying to guide the next generation of our professional field, that might be a direction to send people to the EHS OHIP Program, is that what it's called?

Rebecca Reindel

It's called OHIP, O-H-I, that you can find it at ohipintern.org.

Jill James:

Fabulous. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so thanks for taking that little divergent path. Continue with your story.

Rebecca Reindel

Oh, well, just to say, for that internship, my assignment was I worked with New York City taxi drivers and we were there looking at how the design of their vehicles affects their health, developing survey questionnaires, doing interviews, doing focus groups. It was an incredible experience and I went on to work ... I did a postgraduate fellowship at EPA on indoor air quality and I was there for a year when a job at National OSHA, Federal OSHA opened up and I jumped on it. I went to work in the National OSHA office to right health standards and eventually came over to the AFL-CIO to work with the labor unions on similar work, but it's so amazing how you can learn so much about an agency from the outside.

Jill James:

That's right. That's right. So let's back up to the Federal OSHA job. What sort of laws have your hands been in, Rebecca?

Rebecca Reindel

I worked there during the development of the silica standard which was huge. I actually, I mean I wasn't the lead or anything, but I did work on the silica standard at OSHA and then it was interesting because I transitioned over to the AFL-CIO, right around the time they were doing the public hearings for it, OSHA. So when I worked there, it was around the time of the proposal and then I worked with the labor unions, it's when the final standard came out. So we really got to see it from all the different angles and throughout the process of the standard and watch it really have an impact on working people.

Jill James:

Wow, fantastic. Thank you for that contribution by the way. That's fantastic. That's fantastic. All right, so does this mean we're in your history up to present time, you're at the AFL-CIO?

Rebecca Reindel

I'm here.

Jill James:

Okay. Well, great. I want to ask you what your work is there, but maybe for anyone listening who's not familiar with the AFL-CIO as it relates to what you all do with regard to the environmental health and science work, can you tell us how the federation supports that work? What's it about?

Rebecca Reindel

Sure. You mentioned at the beginning we are a federation, so we ourselves are not a union. We are a federation of 57 national union affiliates. And that covers a wide variety of industries and occupations that you might imagine like manufacturing, construction, healthcare, bus drivers, teachers, firefighters, flight attendants, mechanics. It's also other folks who might not think of, Hollywood actors, stagehands, professional sports players like the NFL PA. And we also last fall just welcomed the National Women's Soccer League Players Association to the federation which is very exciting. So workers really across industries who organize and who understand that collective power is needed to really change their working conditions.

Rebecca Reindel

And so essentially how union members pay dues, those go to their union to represent them and a portion of those come to us to represent them on the national level and to work collectively. And my job at the National AFL-CIO is the director of occupational safety and health and our team plays an important role in the national and international policy space where we advocate for stronger safety and health standards, laws and other programs like training programs. We advocate for more funding for some of these agencies and programs and we use evidence that comes up directly through the workplace, through our membership, through public records, through scientific studies and case studies. So we work very closely and collaborate with our national unions and other organizations along the way. We have a national committee that works together on those issues.

Jill James:

Yeah, wonderful. So, Rebecca, what are some of those ... You mentioned the things that you're currently working on right now. What are some of those areas that is of interest to the federation that you're working on?

Rebecca Reindel

Sure. Some might sound familiar because they've gotten a little bit more attention than others. Occupational heat exposure has been big and folks may have seen it in the news pretty often. We are advocating for stronger workplace violence prevention standards, some stronger chemical standards like for asbestos and for some other chemicals as well. We're trying to improve some injury reporting standards that ensure that we're understanding what's really happening in workplaces and strengthening antiretaliation protections for workers for speaking up about unsafe working conditions.

Jill James:

All right, are you continuing to work with the pandemic as well? Is that an area of emphasis too?

Rebecca Reindel

It's a huge area. I think people think about COVID as an individual, I think people have put it in a lane of individual responsibility or an individual issue, but it really is such a collective issue. And when you think about all the other things I just mentioned, all the other issues, chemicals in the workplace, workplace violence, COVID is a workplace exposure and so it's a big part of what we do. We were the first to petition the Federal OSHA back in March of 2020 for an emergency standard to protect workers. We've been right on the cutting edge of the science and of advocating for getting stronger protections that really protect workers against the airborne nature of the virus and for certain reporting requirements. So COVID is in fact the worst occupational disaster ever and so it's been an all-consuming job during the pandemic for our team.

Jill James:

Yeah. Rebecca, just hearing you say worst occupational disaster ever like stops you, right? Do you mind talking about when you say that, what does that mean and I'm suspecting because you started your career gathering data that you may have something to say about? What is that? Can you give us context around that?

Rebecca Reindel

Sure. We think about what's going on in the public when it comes to COVID, right? We know that nearly 1 million people have died in the US from COVID. We actually had pretty a total lack of real workplace surveillance when it came to people being infected and dying from workplace exposures. And so we've really had to gather a lot of this evidence on our own. There's been some good research on it, but nailing down an exact number of who've been sick at work, one of the I think biggest failures of the country is that they didn't do that from the beginning. But when you think about how you're exposed to the virus, the workplace, it's a big breeding ground for it, right? People work close together, crowded conditions. They don't have the proper protections that they need. They are exposed to people for long periods of time in indoor environments.

Rebecca Reindel

Actually, when you were just saying that about the biggest occupational disaster ever, we used to say that about asbestos and that's very true but until COVID, which is, I mean we don't mean to laugh, it's very, very sad.

Jill James:

That's the context. Yeah.

Rebecca Reindel

But we know that asbestos is everywhere, right? We know that it's so prevalent and we need to protect people from it. So since March of 2020, the unions have submitted many comment ... The unions and the AFL-CIO together have submitted many comments in the public dockets. We've testified. We've submitted to the agency's peer reviewed studies, surveillance data, other documentation showing that healthcare workers, many other workers remain at significant risk from COVID-19 exposures and that there are very feasible things that can be done by employers. And it's something that we can prevent and that we can at least track. It's not something to do nothing about.

Rebecca Reindel

Just in late April, the AFL-CIO and many unions and other experts testified during the OSHA hearings. They're on track to develop a final permanent COVID workplace safety standard.

Jill James:

Oh, good.

Rebecca Reindel

And so we testified in that. Frontline workers came in and testified in that hearing to make sure that, when the standard comes out, actually it makes sense for employers, for workers, it's able to be implemented easily.

Jill James:

Yeah. Rebecca, if you had to get out your crystal ball dusted off to try to figure out, like you said, a permanent standard is underway, we know how long it can take. Do you have any guesses?

Rebecca Reindel

I know that this is on a fast track. The ETS, the Emergency Temporary Standard that came out last year serves as a proposal, so they're already now in the final stages and so because the comment period closes next week and so we're working on that. And then I would not be surprised if they get something like this out this year. I think they've already done so much work on it and that's what we're advocating for. The people need protections as soon as possible, so yeah.

Jill James:

And would the application be for just healthcare or all workers?

Rebecca Reindel

This seems to be in the healthcare lane because that's who the emergency standard covered.

Jill James:

Yeah, right. Okay. That's what I was wondering. All right. Thank you for that context and advocacy on that. You mentioned a moment ago one of the other areas of interest has been heat illness. And for those of us who are following the work that OSHA is doing right now, we know that that's a proposed regulation as well, but these things aren't old, I mean are old rather. Heat illness prevention is not something that's, "Ooh, cutting edge." OSHA has been working on this for a long time, and when you mentioned that, it made me think of ... I'm not sure if I had mentioned this to you in our pre-conversations or not, I worked for OSHA as well for a state agency in Minnesota and Minnesota has had a heat regulation for many years.

Jill James:

And I remember when I was working for the agency, and you may or may not be familiar with this story, but when you said you cover professional sports athletes, Minnesota had a death of a Minnesota Vikings football player many years ago. His name was Korey Stringer and he died of a workplace heat exposure. And I was working for the agency, I was not the investigator of record, one of my coworkers was, but this is not new news.

Rebecca Reindel

This is not new news, and like your example in Minnesota and for decades, workers have been dying from occupational heat exposure or otherwise affected by it. And it's both outdoor workers and indoor workers and there are many ... I think we often think about, as we should, farm workers, construction workers, people who are out blazing direct sun, but there are indoor environments that have major heat issues, warehouses, schools. A lot of the teachers have issues. So there are a lot of reasons to address this. It's a big issue. I know that with climate change, it's been brought to the surface a bit more and with the warming climate warming summers, but now it's warmer year round in many places. And regardless, it's a workplace exposure and we do know how to do some basic things to prevent or to mitigate what workers have to be exposed to.

Jill James:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you mentioned different environments and atmospheres, and again, when I was with the OSHA agency, there was one particular factory that we just knew, you could look at the date on the calendar, you could look at the just ambient temperature outside and we knew we're going to get a complaint. And we knew that there would probably be a couple of complaints during the course of that summer period where workers in this particular factory, just it would happen again and again and again. And unfortunately, for a long time, it seems like the agency couldn't budge that employer to prevent those exposures from happening.

Rebecca Reindel

Absolutely.

Jill James:

Yeah, yeah. One of the other areas of focus that you talked about was workplace violence prevention. I'm wondering if you can talk about your work in that. That's gosh. We're recording today. It's May 17th, 2022. How many shootings have we had in our ... Workplace violence isn't just shootings, but just this week, there have been two in our nation. Yeah, can you talk about your prevention strategies and what you're doing there?

Rebecca Reindel

Sure. So we have been advocating for workplace violence protections for a long time as well, also not a new issue. And particularly, we have focused more recent advocacy on healthcare and social service workers. Now, that's not to say they're the only folks who have violent incidents. As you just mentioned, it's more common across workplaces now, but healthcare and social service workers have astronomical rates of assaults, even if it's not fatality very serious, significant, brutal assaults at work by patients and clients. And OSHA actually put out guidance 25 years ago on protecting ... It's very detailed, comprehensive guidance on protecting healthcare and social service workers from workplace violence. And it's about employers developing a workplace violence prevention program.

Rebecca Reindel

It lays out the different elements that you should include. Just like you think about COVID plan, you think about workplace violence prevention plan. This is really critical. So we've been advocating for OSHA to turn this into an enforceable standard. And in our report that you mentioned, there are some charts in there that really show you there's the astronomical rates in some of these settings in like psych settings and other hospital settings, social work settings. They're literally off the charts compared to many other industries. And so it's become so commonplace, but we also know how to prevent it.

Rebecca Reindel

And the House actually passed workplace violence prevention bill twice in recent years, one in 2019 and one in 2021, same bill, which would require OSHA to issue such a standard and using this programmatic prevention approach. And the Senate last week just introduced ... Senator Baldwin just introduced this bill in the Senate. So this is exciting and it's good work that's moving forward and I know that it's on OSHA's regulatory agenda, but it certainly doesn't help to have some legislation to push them along.

Jill James:

So maybe there's some hope on the horizon. You mentioned that OSHA put out their guidance documents 25 years ago, and again going back in my work history, that just totally lines up. When I was with OSHA, which would have been 25 years ago, we had a State Emphasis Program on workplace violence prevention and I was part of a taskforce team that targeted healthcare, specifically long-term care facilities. We also combined the workplace violence prevention work with ergonomics because of the high rate of musculoskeletal injuries in the healthcare industry.

Jill James:

And then with that went workplace violence, not that the two are together, but those are the two big drivers of workplace injury and illness in the healthcare space and really spent a lot of time and education on what sort of mitigating things can be done. I know I have family members who have spent their careers as paramedics and have many, many stories of workplace violence that they experienced in their work in the emergency services.

Rebecca Reindel

Absolutely, that is a very high-risk profession for that. And OSHA has had other guidance too for late night retail, for taxi, delivery drivers for preventing violence. So it's certainly not restricted to healthcare and social service. And as we're seeing in some other settings, there are ways for employers and workers to work together to identify potential, just like identifying other exposures on the job, right? Where might they come in? How can we control them? How do we get ahead of it? Who's communicating with who? If you can't prevent it, how do you mitigate it? So it is certainly about adequate planning and I think your experience speaks to that too. There have been emphasis programs that really can focus on that model as well.

Jill James:

Yeah, yeah. Rebecca, you just brought it up a second ago about the AFL-CIO's annual report and I talked about it in the beginning and we'll be sure to put it in the show notes, but would you mind talking for a few minutes about what this annual report is about and what discoveries have been made? Maybe where do you even get your information? What are we seeing right now?

Rebecca Reindel

Sure, I'd love to. Hot off the press, the end of April, the AFL-CIO releases an annual report and it's called Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect. And this report was started in 1992, because at the time, no one was comprehensively tracking job fatalities, injuries, illnesses in the United States and they weren't looking at job safety agency enforcement and other activity. And they also weren't looking at actions by the federal government and how our country is doing to reduce work-related injuries, disease and death, and so consequently, also having a need to name the actions and the activities that are needed to improve working conditions in the country.

Rebecca Reindel

So this report was started by my predecessor in 1992 and we're carrying this forward. We hear all the time such an incredible advocacy tool that it is. Everybody keeps a copy, mine's right here next to me, we keep a copy of it for reference. And 31 years later, it's still the most comprehensive report issued on the state of workplace safety and health in our country. And we know though ... Now we pull for data sources. We do pull from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We pull data from OSHA, data from MSHA and then we also provide context a little bit in a narrative of other peer reviewed studies, things that have come out to give have context of what is really going on and also what's needed.

Rebecca Reindel

And so the data out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for this report, the most recent year is 2020, and as you can imagine, that was a year where things looked a little different in terms of workplace injuries, illnesses, fatalities maybe because just work looked very different that year. So we know that the pandemic set a bit of a different landscape for what work looked like in the year that were we reported on this most recent report. Some people were out of work completely. For many others, a lot of work wasn't taking place in person. And so there were some decreases, but the decrease is published, so sure, it may not paint a full picture of how work normally looks. So it's an interesting transition year.

Rebecca Reindel

And we know that for other workers, essential workers on the frontline, they worked with fewer protections and less oversight of all the job safety hazards because of COVID. So they were exposed to greater risks and leaving them disproportionately impacted. And we also know that many of those workers were people of color and you could see a lot of the disproportionate impacts do come out in the report. Black and Latino workers still have a higher job fatality rate than other workers. You see the industries where COVID exposures were high, people were still working. Those were also the industries that had a lot of reports of workplace injuries and fatalities.

Rebecca Reindel

So certainly having to go to work in person can be very dangerous and we do lay out ... There's an executive summary, if people want to check it out. We also have nifty infographics on our website that people are welcome to use and grab and just on the statistics.

Jill James:

Yeah, yeah. When I read it the other week, and gosh, I'm sad to say this is the first time I knew the report existed. You've been doing this for 31 years. So first of all, thank you. And when I picked it up, I'm like, "Oh." I've always gone down the rabbit hole that is the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is great, has a lot, a lot of data, but you can definitely go down various rabbit holes. And OSHA is also good about putting out data, but it's often dated. It takes a long for things to become public. And so when I read your report, I thought, "Oh, my gosh." It's a comprehensive read. I like the narrative that you added to it and I really liked the high points that were pulled out in terms of, "These are the really burning issues of our time right now." And, yeah, thank you so much.

Jill James:

And also another piece of the report I'm thinking about is you have a breakdown by state, which I thought was really interesting. Can you talk about that piece too?

Rebecca Reindel

Sure. At the end of the report, we have what are called state profiles and these are designed, so people can grab them and go. You have a one page with all of the cliff notes of your state on workplace safety and health. It's information on the fatality rate and the number of inspections being done. And the number of employees and employers. It just gives you a bit of a landscape of state specific because our report is both national and it is state by state. Throughout it, we cover funding of the agencies. We FOIA data on whistleblower complaints and enforcement complaints. I don't know who else is looking at that stuff in the level of excruciating detail that that we do. And so I think, like you said, it's just very handy to have all-in-one place and also gives you a picture.

Rebecca Reindel

I think the most important thing about this report is you can see where we've been and then where we are because you have to look, you have to go backwards and see how far have we come in and where do we need to go.

Jill James:

Absolutely for context, yeah. You had mentioned that your predecessor had started this report back in 1992. So it's in your hands now, Rebecca. So this is your annual baby.

Rebecca Reindel

This is it.

Jill James:

Wow. Thank you so much for that. Anyone who's looking for data, man, I'd say go to their website or look in our show notes and you'll be able to find it there. We'll make sure, Nayeem, our producer puts it in the show notes for you. You had mentioned when we were talking earlier about some of the work of the AFL-CIO in terms of introducing workplace health and safety standards and you talked about current times and what you're working on right now. Just for historical context, do you have information there? Could you share things that the AFL-CIO has championed in the past that those of us who've been at this work for a while might go, "Oh, really? I didn't know that"?

Rebecca Reindel

Sure. I think every OSHA rulemaking, every standard that Federal OSHA has put out, the AFL-CIO has definitely been involved in at least every major health rulemaking. So when you think about ... Certainly a lot of the safety ones as well, when you think about lead exposures, asbestos, the standards on all of those going back, and beryllium, when you think about the cotton dust standard, the AFL-CIO has been involved in every rulemaking. And when I say involved, meaning pulling together comments for it, testifying, bringing in workers really advocating for critical pieces of the standard to be in place like exposure assessments and medical removal protections, anti-retaliation provisions. And so all of those health rule-makings over the years, we've certainly been directly involved in and many of the unions have too where their members are closely affected.

Jill James:

Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Thank you for that historical context. And speaking of history, the labor movement has been around for a really long time now. Do you see or, I guess, what are you seeing? Are we seeing a surge in the labor movement? And maybe putting it in historical context for us because there was certainly a height in our country of the labor movement itself and I don't know when that was, I have a guess, but putting it in context, what are we seeing today?

Rebecca Reindel

Sure. We really are seeing a great resurgence, and the labor movement, I think people think sometimes, "Is this a new thing that we have?" It's like, "Well, no, the labor movement never went away, right?" Now more than ever though, workers are really standing up and speaking out, taking action for better and safer working conditions and a host of other reasons, better pay retirement, etcetera. But some people have said, "Oh, it's because of COVID," and that is true, but I wouldn't say that the working conditions really are any different necessarily. The working conditions in many settings have been poor for a very long time, and the pandemic, what the pandemic did was really exposed that and really brought that to the public eye.

Rebecca Reindel

Many of these workers, we think about the people we really relied on when everybody else was staying home, people who are making our food and different products, manufacturing and grocery stores and meat processing, transportation, corrections. There are people who are at work no matter what, but what the public, I think, realized with the pandemic is what happens when there aren't enforceable workplace standards in place. And they also realized when laws aren't strong enough for workers to speak up or to ensure their own safety on the job. People also became more aware of when employers aren't following the laws that do exist and also how difficult it is to make your own workplace safer and the power dynamics in the workplace that became even more real. And people really realized that organizing together is the only way to really make the changes in many cases.

Rebecca Reindel

So when there aren't strong laws or when your employer isn't keeping you safe, people want to band together and collective action has been very critical for them to do that because they didn't have any other options, many workers. And when you think about it, you go back a century, decades, decades, you go back a century you think about things like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. The anniversary of that was just in April, and for folks-

Jill James:

Yeah, please, please, please. Yeah, tell the story. Please take time and tell the story of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire.

Rebecca Reindel

Sure, it's certainly not the only major example of workers coming together and organizing around safer working conditions, but this is when garment workers were working on the top level of a very high building in New York City back in 1911, crammed and crowded, dirty, just crowded, unsanitary conditions and a fire broke out. The employers had locked the doors because they didn't want garment workers stealing fabric. And so the doors had been locked and workers had to face, and it's mostly women and also children who were working here and they had to face the decision of staying up there in the middle of the fire or many of them left to their death.

Rebecca Reindel

And so you've seen a lot of horrifying pictures when you look at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, a lot of women on the sidewalk around the building because huge tragedy. But the fire alone wasn't what made the Shirtwaist maker such a focal point for the worker safety because workplace deaths weren't totally uncommon at the time. In 1911, I think more than 100 workers died every day on the job, but nothing would have happened if people hadn't united and made demands of their employers and also demands of their government to have stronger standards. And so they started organizing actually a few years before the fire and in the years leading, so people think it was the fire that started it, but the women were already organizing and it was the years leading up to the fire. They held the general strike. Women workers were also attacked and beaten for trying to organize.

Rebecca Reindel

It really spurred though. What it did is it also helped a lot of women from different classes came together around after the fire. There were women of all sorts of classes who came together to fight for better standards and leverage all of their resources to actually win fire safety laws and worker compensation laws in New York and then those trickled to other states. So now, as a result of decades of working people doing those unions, there are now both federal and state laws that provide basic safety and health protections that we all have come to know, of course, and worker rights, but workplaces are a bit safer today than they were in the early 1900s for sure, but there are many problems that remain.

Rebecca Reindel

And in the report that we mentioned that we released, still more than 5,000 workers die traumatic injuries, we have 120,000 workers who die from occupational diseases. Several millions of workers are severely injured every year. So we do have a long way to go and I think the fire, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire was one of the events that led to longer term social and labor reforms in the US, right?

Jill James:

Yeah, right.

Rebecca Reindel

One of the witnesses of the fire-

Jill James:

I was wondering ...

Rebecca Reindel

Right?

Jill James:

Yeah, yeah. Okay, go for it.

Rebecca Reindel

... was Francis Perkins and she later became the secretary of labor under FDR. So yeah, definitely, it inspired people to change.

Jill James:

Yeah. And under Francis Perkins' leadership, I believe I'm correct in saying this, Rebecca, we have her to thank for our 40-hour workweek ...

Rebecca Reindel

Right, yup.

Jill James:

... and breaks mandatory breaks. Yeah, you're right, she was there. She was witnessing these women who were leaping, as you said, to their death that day and so she was certainly one of the champions.

Rebecca Reindel

Yeah, and it's important to remember that it does take many decades to win very basic workplace safety and health laws and protections and that they can also disappear. You hear people say, "Why do we need unions? We have laws now."

Jill James:

But not for everything as we found out in the last two years.

Rebecca Reindel

Exactly. Not for everything, certainly not for emerging hazards, also not even for some of these hazards that have been around for a long time and also protections aren't necessarily permanent. We know that they can be taken off the books if people aren't there to hold the government accountable. So you have that, you think about in terms of history, you think of the coal mine disasters. You think about the Gauley bridge disaster with the asbestos, or sorry, it was silica. And so there are many examples of horrific safety and health conditions, but it's not like we're out of the woods. We know that people are exposed to some pretty nasty stuff every day still.

Jill James:

That's right. That's right. Everyone listening likely knows someone within their inner circle, whether a family member or friend who has experienced some sort of adverse effect from workplace health and safety issues. I know I have them in my family for sure. You probably have them in yours as well. Yeah, yeah. Rebecca, we're talking about women, we're talking about what the women in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory were working on. We talked about Francis Perkins. You focus on women in your report as well and their representation within the labor movement itself. Can you talk a little bit more about what you're finding and what you're seeing right now, specifically with women in the workplace?

Rebecca Reindel

Sure. Well, I think there's a lot to say, but I'll try to keep it short. But I think, when I talked about workplace violence earlier with healthcare and social service workers, women really bear the brunt of those injuries too. So there are certain hazards where women are really largely represented by being exposed or being injured, which is certainly some areas to focus on. We recently came across reports that show that next to the military, the AFL-CIO is the largest organization of working women in the country. And each year, the gap between the number of union men and union women in America is getting smaller and women are actually projected to be the majority of union members by 2025.

Rebecca Reindel

So it's certainly, I think, largely due to representation in the public sector, right? That is really, I think, the main driver of that and so local and state government workers. And yeah, so we're growing. The labor movement is growing. There's a lot of context about why the growth isn't as fast as it used to be. You have the so-called right to work laws. We have a bigger service industry now and not as many manufacturing jobs in the US. There's a lot to get into there, but essentially when you look at the industries that are growing and you look at the unionization rates, that does seem to be some of the breakdown.

Jill James:

Interesting. Following along what you said, women are making up, will be soon the largest working cohort that are represented in the country soon, you also, at the AFL-CIO, have the first female president, right?

Rebecca Reindel

In fact, we do. Yes, President Liz Shuler is the first woman president of the AFL-CIO and she came into office at the end of last summer and she comes out of the trades, she comes out of the IBEW, the electrical workers and she's really committed to ... She loves labor, committed to busting myths about labor to really leveraging the diversity in the labor movement and really looking, driving forward on social justice issues and innovative approaches to really making sure that every working person has a voice on their job and pushing for stronger workplace safety laws in my lane but many other lanes.

Jill James:

Yeah, yeah. Well, Rebecca, as we're rounding up our time together today, I'm wondering, are there other things you'd like to share and/or Is there good news, encouraging news that you'd like to leave our audience with?

Rebecca Reindel

Well, that's a big question, but I would-

Jill James:

Yeah, sorry.

Rebecca Reindel

No problem. We are always looking for also ways to get our message out there. So if there are good vehicles for ... If people want to be bridging the gap with workplace safety unions in workplaces, we want to hear what's going on in the field. We love hearing from people. There's a general contact email address through our website. Of course, some of us are in Twitter and all of that, but we're here to represent workers in their workplaces and that's what we do. And I really encourage people to check out the OHIP program that I mentioned. I think it's just a fabulous program.

Rebecca Reindel

And if it folks know anything about Tony Mazzocchi, he was an incredible leader in the '70s and '80s and '90s and he has an amazing story. So I would just say that I think, where we're going, we really have to also think about where we've been and what's made us successful to drive forward and get standards, to get protections passed. It's harder these days than it used to be. There are a lot more barriers and we're not going to let that stop us. We're fighting for stronger safer working conditions. And I think just building on collective action to do that. So please check out our report, please check out the program, OHIP, and, yeah, we love your podcasts, so thank you so much for doing this.

Jill James:

Oh, wow. You're very welcome, Rebecca. I really appreciate you taking the time today. And thank you so much for being the next champion of your annual report. I don't think I'm ever going to miss it again. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for your work in advocacy.

Rebecca Reindel

Thanks a lot, Jill.

Jill James:

And thank you all for spending your time listening today, and more importantly, thank you for your contribution toward the common good, making sure your workers including your temporary workers make it home safe every day. If you aren't subscribed and want to hear past and future episodes, you can subscribe in iTunes, the Apple Podcast app or any other podcast player you'd like. We'd love it if you could leave a rating and review us on iTunes. It really helps us connect the show with more and more health and safety professionals like Rebecca. Special thanks to Nayeem Jeraisi, podcast producer and until next time. Thanks for listening.