WSJ What’s News - The Struggle to Keep America’s Workers Safe

Episode Date: December 21, 2025

For over 100 years, keeping Americans safe on the job has challenged the country's free-market economy. Businesses often preferred to regulate their workplaces without government oversight. But that track record is mixed. And federal efforts at safeguarding job sites at times have fallen short. Host Katherine Sullivan explores how far we've come since Frances Perkins helped put employee safety in the spotlight and what American workers still face now when they go to work.  This episode is part of The Wall Street Journal’s USA250: The Story of the World’s Greatest Economy, a collection of articles, videos and podcasts aiming to offer a deeper understanding of how America has evolved. Additional reading and listening: A Timeline of Key Moments in the History of Work in America  Coal Miners’ Trade Off: Trump Boosts Production but Slashes Safety Programs  An Economy Built on Speculation—for Better and for Worse  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is a new era of American Innovation. Drive Health used Google AI to develop an AI-powered agentic nurse that provides real-time support to patients 24-7. Learn more at g.co.com slash American Innovation. When Eric Reyes-Briga first got a job in the stone fabrication industry, he liked it. He worked with customers and learned a skilled trade. For me, it was interesting because I'm the kind of.

a person that likes to learn a lot of things. It was something new. Reyes Briga, who's now 36 years old and has two children, was making countertops, like the ones you may have in your kitchen or bathroom. He would take large slabs of stone and cut them to a customer's specific dimensions, then polish and round off the edges, exactly to spec. He says they took basic precautions in his shop. No one told him about the risks.

Nobody was saying anything about it was dangerous or something. about you say, you know, why you have to wear this kind of thing, where he's going to do this to your body, they never said anything. About two years ago, Ray Esperiga's father-in-law, who he worked alongside, had trouble breathing. He was diagnosed with a disease he had never heard of, silicosis. Silicosis is an irreversible, incurable, incurable lung disease, caught from inhaling small particles of silica dust over several decades, usually in heavy industrial settings.

It's been called Grinders' Disease, Miner's Pythus, and Potters Rot. It's the world's oldest known occupational disease. There's evidence of it occurring in Neolithic men who chiseled tools and weapons out of stone. It's also been seen in the lungs of Egyptian mummies. Reyes Briga's wife encouraged him to get a CT scan himself. He had been cutting engineered stone for about a decade. His results came back positive for silicosis. It was shocked.

It was shocking because, like, pretty much I had to start rethinking about my entire career that I had to start from scratch again, how to look for a job, how to look for something that I had to be, give me enough money to support my family. Imagine seeing my kids suffering every time they see their grandpa and then seeing me at the same time, in the same place, pretty much. It's a disease that's 100% preventable. Like the appropriate number of people that should get silicosis is zero. Dr. Jane Fasio is a pulmonologist for the UCLA medical system.

In the past five years, she's begun seeing more and more silicosis patients, including men in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. Silicosis was something she'd read about in medical school, but it wasn't something she expected to see in 21st century America. And so that's when I started to ask, what is it that you're doing and found that they all had been working? in what we call fabrication of stone countertops. Over the past decade, Reyes Briga and his colleagues started working more and more with engineered stone slabs instead of natural stone slabs.

These kinds of countertop materials have exploded in popularity in the U.S. They're durable, affordable, and they come in all kinds of colors and patterns. Often made to look like marble, they're actually made of a combination of quartz and other materials. In recent years, they've been one of the top. two most prevalent countermaterials in the country. Many of these engineered stone slabs have an extremely high concentration of silica, far more than marble or other natural stone. While they're safe once installed, they can be extremely dangerous to work with.

When workers like Reus Bariga cut, trim, and polish the slabs to fit your kitchen or bathroom, they inhale extremely fine silica dust, which then inflames and scars their lungs. And once that scarring begins, it is not reversible. Eventually, the scarring becomes so debilitating that the patients may require a lung transplant. Just this fall, the state of California strengthened regulations around handling engineered stone in the workplace. But it's still unclear if the new measures will be strong enough to prevent workers from catching the disease. This month, Massachusetts issued a safety alert after a counterfeit. countertop fabrication worker was diagnosed with silicosis.

After a spate of silicosis cases in Australia, last year the government there banned the use and importation of these countertop materials. Ray Asperiga quit his fabrication job and is suing companies that manufacture or sell engineered stone in a personal injury case. He got a new job working for an organization seeking to educate stoneworkers on the risks of silicosis. He encourages them to leave the industry as soon as they can. He said his doctors have told him that continued exposure will only hasten the disease. When I got out, I told them that I got out of the industry. They told me that you're congratulation.

You are going to live a little bit longer. But at the end of the day, you're still going to end up probably under a list of lung transplant, eventually. Ray Asperiga's story is part of a larger struggle for a safe work. workplace. That struggle has been a source of tension in the American economy for over a hundred years. Some companies have successfully balanced their workers' well-being with their financial goals. Others have not. Now, as the U.S. enters a looser regulatory environment, what does our past tell us about the future of workplace safety? It's Sunday, December 21st. I'm Catherine Sullivan for the Wall Street Journal.

This is USA 250, a podcast series connecting America's economic present to its past. We'll be occasionally dropping into your what's news feed over the next few months, with stories that interrogate, celebrate, and make sense of our economic history. This is episode two, the struggle to keep America's workers safe. To understand the state of the American workplace today, we have to understand how things used to be. The accident happened on a Saturday. In March 1911, a young woman named Francis Perkins

was walking near Washington Square Park in Manhattan. She recalled the event during a lecture she gave over 50 years later. I happened to have been visiting a friend in the park, and we heard the engines and we heard the screams, and rushed over where we could see that trouble was. They could see a large, 10-story building, with the top three floors on fire. It was a garment factory called Triangle Shirt Waste

that made women's cotton blouses. Employees there worked long shifts, 10 to 13 hours a day, 6 to 7 days a week. It was essentially a sweatshop. We could see this building from Washington Square and the people had just begun to jump when we got there. With doors to the main staircases of the factory locked and smoke billowing out of the building,

young garment workers crowded at the 8th, 9th, and 10th floor windows, while firemen below struggled to get nets out to catch them. This one in the window was too crowded, and they would jump, and they hit the sidewalk. And the weight of the bodies was so great at the speed at which they were traveling that they broke through the net. And every one of them was killed. Everybody who jumped was killed. It was a horrifying spectacle.

At least 146 people, mostly Jewish and Italian immigrant women and girls, died in the Triangle Fire. The owners of the factory had locked the doors to all but one exit to prevent employees from stealing a stray blouse while on the job. The accident captured the public's attention, at a time when Americans were beginning to see the toll that industrialized workplaces were having on employees. In the early 20th century, there was really a massive, I think using the word slaughter is not too strong of workers. Gerald Markowitz is a historian of public health, a professor at John Jay College in New York, and an author of over a dozen books on occupational and public health. In the first couple of decades of the 20th century, there's an estimate that 35,000 workers died every year on the job.

Two million suffered injuries. So that's the context for the triangle fire. But it was, in a sense, the tip of the iceberg of what was happening to workers in a wide variety of industries, steel, railroads, mining, iron, meatpacking. Until this time, responsibility for worker safety was generally laid on the, individual workers themselves, not on their employers. In response to the Triangle Fire, an industry group called the National Association of Manufacturers attempted to double down on this idea by producing a silent film called The Crime of Carelessness. It depicted a worker starting a deadly fire by mindlessly tossing a match onto the floor. The outrage over Triangle didn't let up.

Activists pushed lawmakers to shift responsibility for safe workplaces. onto companies. In the years after the fire, New York State passed over two dozen new laws related to working conditions. Employers became responsible for providing safer buildings to work in and for following building fire codes, including leaving doors to exit stairwells unlocked. By the 1930s, Francis Perkins, who had witnessed the fire, was appointed Secretary of Labor by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

She was the first female cabinet secretary and brought her agenda to the job. Many of the New York state reforms passed after the Triangle Fire were soon made federal law. Employers were put on notice. When we come back from the break, another public tragedy again raises the question of how to keep workers safe. But this time, from a different kind of threat. This is a new era of American innovation. Using Google AI, Etsy is making it easier for shoppers to discover unique creations and helping sellers connect with the people who love their work.

at g.co slash American Innovation. As the federal government began to regulate workplaces in the 1930s, another tragedy was about to grab the public's attention. This time, it wasn't a fire or an accident. It was a disease. Silicosis. Here's historian Gerald Markowitz again. If I had to point to a time when.

The awareness of chronic disease in the national consciousness really developed, it would be during the 1930s, in part because so many workers were identified finally as suffering from silicosis, and they had nowhere to turn. In the 1930s, hundreds of men were hired to dig the Gauly Bridge Tunnel in West Virginia. Near a town called Gawley Bridge in West Virginia, thousands of workers were hired by a chemical company Union Carbide to drill a tunnel through a mountain. It was called Hawks Nest Tunnel.

They worked with virtually no protection in a tunnel thick with silica dust. 476 men died here from silicosis. Later estimates have put the death toll from this disaster at over 700. Some even put it at 1,000. will likely never know the real number of dead. Most of the men were black migrant workers who had come looking for work from states further south. When they died, the company buried them in unmarked graves.

Other sick workers left the job site and went back home to their families in the south, where it's very likely they died of the disease at their homes. Workers were dying so quickly that it became a national news story. The blues singer Josh White performed a song about the tragedy titled, Silicosis is Killing Me. There's even video footage of some of the sick workers. My name is Waller Kincaid. I worked in the tunnel four or five weeks.

Every day I hear of someone dying with silicose. I worked until I got sick, and the doctor told me that it was psilicose. And he also told me that anyone that worked as much as 24 hours would not be lived in 15 years. I think something should be done for our wives and family after we are gone. It was both a news story as well as a congressional investigation and really put occupational disease on the political. map, put silicosis on the political map. 1935, a wave of fear was sweeping the country. Silicosis was taking its toll from the ranks of American workers.

Cause of the disease, dust. Results of the disease, disablingment, poverty, death. Cure for the disease, none. Secretary of Labor, Francis Perkins, ordered reports into the disaster and had the Department of Labor make a film raising awareness about silicosis. aptly titled Stop Silicosis. After years of exposure to silica, once strong and healthy, John Steele is now weak and amaciated. And this led to congressional hearings in the 1930s.

And I think that that very much stimulated a national concern about chronic disease. It was really the first time that occupied. diseases reached a national consciousness and a recognition that something needed to be done about it. But it didn't rise to the level of national legislation. The federal government was only just beginning to attempt to regulate the most basic aspects of private workplaces. It would take over 30 more years for national legislation to be passed about silicosis or

about any workplace disease. In the meantime, industry worked together through their own groups to try and set their own health standards and inform businesses of workplace health risks. They established certain standards of exposure to literally hundreds of substances, but of course there was no enforcement of that. It was all voluntary. There was a recognition that companies should be doing this, but there was no way of knowing how much was actually done by specific companies. In the immediate aftermath of the Hawksnest Tunnel disaster, over 200 industry representatives came together to form the Air Hygiene Foundation. The group later changed its name to the Industrial Hygiene Foundation. Over the next 30 years, similar industry groups would form to release

voluntary safety guidance about a number of different workplace harms. That included asbestos, which causes cancer when inhaled. And in part, they're doing it because they don't want federal regulation, and they recognize that if they can establish standards and inform businesses about what the dangers are, that they can stave off federal regulation. And really, they're successful at that until 1970. But companies' attempts at self-regulation weren't successful enough. In the years leading up to 1970, illness and injuries on the job had increased,

and the federal government finally took action. We have perhaps one of the most important pieces of legislation to pass in this Congress. That year, President Nixon signed the Occupational Health and Safety Act, or OSHA, into law. It was the first time a federal agency was tasked purely with protecting workers' health. Twelve thousand five hundred people lost their lives in accidents in America's factories and in other places of business. And over two million people were injured. This bill deals with that. The Occupational Health and Safety Agency was housed in the Department of Labor.

The Act also established another agency called Nayaas, the National Institute of Occupation. safety and health. That agency was staffed with scientists. They produced studies that both industry and OSHA could use when crafting safety rules. From the beginning, the role of both OSHA and NIOSH was to work with industry for their economic benefit. One of the first lines of the act refers to how worker injuries and illness can lead to, quote, loss production, wage loss, medical expenses, and disability compensation payments. Despite the explicit emphasis on saving corporate time and money, lots of companies didn't welcome the creation of OSHA. They preferred how they had operated before with their own voluntary systems of safety controls.

When given the choice between regulation and non-regulation, companies would always prefer non-regulation. They would prefer to be able to operate on their own. But I guess in addition to that, they came to understand that a genie was being let out of the bottle. Industry fought back against a flurry of actual and proposed regulations in the 1970s, including a proposed silica standard. They ran a campaign called Nix on OSHA. Industries with silica exposure formed the Silica Safety Association, a group that lobbied heavily against silica exposure standards.

Still, the agency was able to do important work in the 1970s. It passed regulations limiting worker exposure to asbestos, vinyl chloride, and lead, among other toxic substances. Workplace injuries and deaths began to decline. When President Ronald Reagan entered office in 1981, he took a business-friendly approach. His appointed OSHA chief recalled and destroyed three OSHA films about worker rights and safety.

Some union leaders defied the orders, and a few copies of films like this one survived. In 1968, at the height of the war in Vietnam, 14,000 Americans were killed, and 46,000 were wounded. That same year, another 14,000 Americans were killed. But those lives were lost right here in the United States, because those American men and women were killed at work.

on the job. Regulatory actions have continued to ebb and flow based on presidential administrations. But OSHA has never been as active as it was in its first decade. Dr. David Michaels is an epidemiologist and a former OSHA administrator in the Obama administration. When I got to OSHA in 2009, I found that certainly many employers really recognized the importance of OSHA. They were certainly not scared of OSHA. They were concerned about getting citations, but really they did want to make sure their workers were safe. Industry had been so successful at preventing OSHA from making regulation

that when Michaels got there, the agency's standards were out of date. And industry knew that. There are thousands of chemicals used in workplaces. OSHA only has exposure limits for less than 500. Of that, only 30 new standards have been updated or established since 1971. OSHA health standards are so out of date that they're pretty much irrelevant for many of the employers who worry about these exposures. During his time in office, Michael's managed to push through a new silica exposure standard, updating the 1971 regulation in existence. But he said that many other hazards remained under-regulated, requiring companies to implement their own stricter standards.

They recognize that they have to be safer. the notion requires them to be, and they are. When we come back, a CEO turns to safety as he turns his company around. I would call myself a jack of all trades. I've run every aspect. asset within Conoco Phillips when it was a Fortune 5 company. I was the CEO of Chevron Phillips Chemical. Then later, the CEO of Lionel Bucel to help bring it out of bankruptcy.

James Gallagley is a former petrochemical executive. People I spoke to for this episode told me that he proved it was possible for a company to prioritize both profits and safety. Lionel Bucel is a Dutch petrochemical company with refineries and other chemical processing plants in the U.S. When Gallagley took over in 2009, the company was in the middle of bankruptcy proceedings. But instead of focusing solely on profits, Gallagley took a different approach. Safety is a religion to me.

It turns out that if you operate really, really well, you're doing a lot of things right, and that begins with safety. I spoke to occupational safety experts, who said their research shows that when you prioritize health and safety procedures, your production processes just function better. They become more efficient. Gallagley updated facilities that he felt were unsafe. He got pushback from investors who balked at the idea of spending money during a bankruptcy. Gallagley insisted.

Then he turned to the company's culture. A lot of executives will stand and say, you know, safety is one of our top priorities. And very few of them can walk into a plant and do an audit. or most of those executives don't have a pair of coveralls at every plant in the system. I did. He also instituted bonuses for employees who performed well on safety. Workers who failed to report safety problems in their areas were fired.

Lyondale Bissell even made sure their downstream clients followed correct safety protocols. If they couldn't pass our safety audit, we would not sell to them. I can think of multiple instances. where we just said, I know you'll pay a very good price, but we're not going to let you use our product. Under Gallagley's leadership, the company not only emerged from bankruptcy, but made a stunning turnaround, helped by the shale boom. Its stock price rose roughly 200%.

They were also recognized for their strong safety record. Gallagley retired from Lionel Bacell in 2015, and the company's track record has faltered since. In 2021, there was a fatal accident at a plant in Leport, Texas, that killed two workers and put dozens more at risk. One of the obvious questions is, well, how is the company doing today? You know, is it the same? And the answer is no. No. We reached out to Liondell Bousel, and they said they have a best-in-class safety record that puts the company's safety performance in the top 10% among its peers. They cited key safety metrics, including one that his members.

improved by 50% over the past decade. In 2023, the most recent year for which we have government data, workplace injuries and fatalities were down from recent years. Deaths from occupational illnesses are harder to track, but according to the Union Federation AFL-CIO, at least 135,304 people died from illness and disease caused by their work. The AFL-CIO estimates that the real toll is likely much higher. This year, the Trump administration has proposed major cuts to OSHA's funding. In January 2025, Representative Andy Biggs, a Republican from Arizona, introduced a bill to abolish OSHA.

And earlier this year, the Trump administration all but gutted NIOSH, the agency that produces scientific evidence for OSHA. Nyash had a team of scientists studying the dust from Russia. engineered stone countertops, like the ones that sickened Eric Reyes-Buriga in L.A. The cuts were challenged in court, but these scientists remain on administrative leave. In response to our request for comment, a health and human services spokesperson said that, quote, the Trump administration is committed to protecting essential services like those that support masons, coal miners, and firefighters through NIOSH. Without a complete team of government,

government scientists to research up-and-coming hazards, Dr. David Michaels, the former OSHA chief, doesn't see a way to fill this gap. These days, I don't see many positive outcomes in public health. I think the research won't be done. I don't see industry coming together and saying collectively, we need to fund this research, and that's unfortunate. While industry has at times stepped in and made positive changes, the outlook for the safety of American employees is far from certain. Many workers remain at risk.

The United States really believes in individualism, the benefits of free enterprise, and it takes a lot to overcome that. And unfortunately, it seems that a lot means workers' lives. And that's very sad. And that's it for the special edition of What's New Sunday for December 21st. USA 250 The Struggle to Keep America's Workers Safe is produced by me, Catherine Sullivan, with supervising producer Jana Heron. Additional support from Falana Patterson and Chris Zinsley,

sound design and mixing by Jess Fenton, fact-checking by Checking by Aparta Nathan. Special thanks to Intipa Pacheco, Chris Marr, Kyle Manler, Mark Lees, Matthew Johnson, Mark Pagel, and John Gray. Michael LaValle wrote our theme music. Jessica Fenton is our technical manager. Aisha El Mousselaim is our development producer. Chris Zinsley is our deputy editor. And Flana Patterson is the Wall Street Journal's head of news audio.

I'm Catherine Sullivan, and we'll be back in the new year with another installment of our USA 250 podcast. What's News will be back with a new one. episode tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening. The spirit of innovation is deeply ingrained in America, and Google is helping Americans innovate in ways both big and small. To give patients 24-7 access to health care and support care teams, drive health used Google AI to develop an AI-powered agentic nurse that provides real-time support so health care providers can extend their reach. This is a new era of American Innovation. Learn more at g.co slash American Innovation.