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Dear Subscriber,

WHERE'S THE OUTRAGE?

Last month, The New York Times - PBS series of articles and a broadcast documentary told of thousands of injuries and hundreds of OSHA violations at pipe foundries owned by a little-known but very prosperous Alabama business. Days later, Organization Resources Counselors wrote to The Times:

"It is baffling to many who devote their professional lives to protecting workers that there is not an ongoing and unrelenting sense of public outrage about the 19 workers who, on average, die every day of every year in America from workplace injuries.

"What is missing," wrote ORC, which advises more than 150 large corporations on safety and health issues, "is a relentless, pervasive social intolerance for the kinds of workplace conditions that your series describes."

Are you baffled?

In this edition of ISHN's e-newsletter, we offer some answers to that age-old question: Where's the outrage?

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EVERYDAY OUTRAGES

Let's start with what should be obvious: Outrageous acts do occur every day in the world of safety pros, as the ORC letter points out.

This is outrageous: Three sprinkler company workers aren't even working - they're on lunch break - when a wobbly 30-foot wall falls apart at a Home Depot construction site in North Carolina. The three are buried beneath 40,000 pounds of concrete. Rescuers spend five hours in a summer afternoon digging out the bodies. Consequences? Five companies are fined a total of $32,900, slightly more than $10,000 for each life.

So is this: Twelve people - not even workers - camping out 350 yards from a corroded section of a gas pipeline are incinerated when a 1,200-degree F fireball escapes. Investigators conclude that the August, 2000 blast near Carlsbad, N.M., is caused by the pipeline operator's poor inspection program.

Scan the Internet for news like this and, regrettably, something always turns up. A man loses both arms when electrocuted while working on a transformer. A temp worker falls from the back of a garbage truck 30 minutes into his new job, strikes his head on the asphalt, and is killed. A maintenance worker replacing tiles on the ceiling of St. Louis's domed stadium plunges 200 feet to his death.

But denial can run deeper than outrage. The stories are distant. They happen somewhere else, to people we don't know.

As the singer Steve Earle said in a recent interview: "We've forgotten about a blue collar segment in America. Those people are completely and totally disenfranchised and completely and totally forgotten."

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LOST IN THE SHUFFLE

How can 17 million people get lost and forgotten? That's how many manufacturing employees still toil in U.S. factories. Of course the numbers have been dropping like machine tool orders in the Rust Belt for decades as the service economy takes flight. And only about half of the 17 million actually work on production lines. The rest are now engineers, designers, marketing consultants and logistics specialists, according to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal.

Still, where's that "relentless, persuasive social intolerance" for the dirty, at times deadly work done by millions everyday? Denial is one excuse. Ignorance is another. Heck, even the families of these workers often don't know what they do all day.

"My husband would only say that it was bad. Little did I know how bad it was," wrote the wife of an employee at one of the foundries profiled in the PBS broadcast, in an email to the network. "Many times I have wished that he had never left the position he had, as well as the security of the job. However, after seeing and reading the investigation, I am proud of him for leaving."

There's a lot we don't know - or care to know. Most of us couldn't even tell you if our own home and family are threatened by nearby chemical manufacturing. How about this fact: In one poll, only 25 percent of people living within a one-mile radius of a plant with a high probability of a chemical release occurring were aware that the facility even existed.

If we don't know about threats in our own backyard, why get exercised over noisy, sweaty workplaces locked away in lonely towns like Elmira, New York; Tyler, Texas; and Phillipsburg, New Jersey?

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LET'S MAKE A DEAL

Speaking of forgotten. . . Here's an example of our famous short-term memory - and how you can wheel and deal and advertise your way out of outrage. Remember the headlines in the summer of 2000 when Bridgestone Corp.'s Firestone unit had to recall 6.5 million tires linked to fatal accidents, mostly on Ford Explorers? Firestone took a pounding in the press, its credibility down there with Exxon after the Valdez oil spill and Union Carbide after Bhopal. Consumers scrambled for other brands.

But Bridgestone's market share only slipped about two percentage points. What happened? The Wall Street Journal described it this way: "Once the Firestone recall fell out of the headlines, the public did what it has increasingly been doing: buying whatever was on sale."

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WHAT, ME WORRY?

What's missing is intolerance, says ORC. But it's easy to be tolerant when the bad stuff happens to the other guy. You've probably seen research to this effect: "Accidents more likely to happen to the poor."

Being of lower socioeconomic status increases the risk of dying from "external causes" such as car accidents, fires, poisonings, falls and homicides, especially for men, a new U.S. study shows. Researchers found that men who fell into the lowest 25 percent in terms of socioeconomic status were nearly three times more likely to die of such causes than men in the highest 25 per cent.

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WALK ON BY

Even when we see a problem, we don't always do something about it. What did you do the last time you saw an accident on the road? According to California Highway Patrol officers, far too many people just keep going.

One Friday night this winter, a big rig rolling down Interstate 10 in Southern California ran over an 18-year-old boy who had just been thrown from his car in an accident. Flares were set up and cars slowed to a crawl as drivers gawked. But only one woman got out and gave police a statement.

Only 10 or 15 percent of hit and runs get solved, according to one CHP officer. He blames it on apathy. People just don't want to get involved, and report what they witness.

It's a drive-by world. "Whatever. . ." as we like to say.

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THAT WAS THEN. . .

Organization Resources Counselors is not alone in asking where the outrage has gone.

William Bennett was so put off by the public's collective shrug to President Clinton's follies he wrote a book about it, "The Death of Outrage." Writes Bennett:

"Without being judgmental, Americans would never have put an end to slavery, outlawed child labor, emancipated women, or ushered in the civil rights movement."

Add to that wiping out many, but certainly not all, of the worst of working conditions.

But you need to go back nearly 100 years to see that muck being raked. Back when practically everyone wore blue collars and knew first-hand about the dangers of factory work. Articles like William Hand's, "The Law of the Killed and Wounded," a 1908 account of families torn apart when accidents robbed them of the breadwinner, hit close to home.

Books, articles, research, and photographs all assaulted the sensibilities of an unsuspecting public: