Horrific Deaths Still Haunt Our Factories

Most have heard horrific worker deaths at the hands of their machines not being turned off when they should. Working in Chicago’s International Harvester Tractor Works as a teen, one yarn warned us of going into the giant steel press to “clean” it of debris …

To this day, I can only imagine how long it took to “clean” that press of the worker’s entrails after doing what he was told to do, not knowing his co-workers hadn’t fully turned off the power and/or blocked off the massive cylinder that shaped the metal skin of an IH Tractor. And yet, fast forward more than a half century later and the WSJ’s exclusive report tells us “Employees get caught in machinery that isn’t powered down during maintenance,” with mandated lockout warnings & protocols often ignored.

Modern day OSHA regulations provide hefty fines for factories that take safety short-cuts or ignore the lockout rules. The violations reported, the WSJ notes, still runs into the “hundreds” yearly, so those fines don’t seem to have much of a deterrence. Then, again, Workers’ Compensation laws in each state typically shield employers from lawsuits in exchange for specified payments based on the loss of body parts. Can new technologies come to the workers’ rescue? “Interlock” devices on newer machines, for example, provide for an automatic shut off if it senses a door has been opened or a guard has been lifted. And yet, even that new idea is being contested by some unions because using a machine to shut off a machine can be more problematic than a human following the existing lockout rules.

Davd Soul