On Monday, March 18, a worker was killed after being pinned underneath a forklift on Terminal Island at the port of Los Angeles. The still unnamed worker is one of the latest victims of America’s industrial slaughterhouse.
In America, one worker is killed on the job every 96 minutes. In 2022, the latest year calculated, there were 5,486 fatal work injuries. Another estimated 120,000 workers died from occupational diseases.
Four days before the death on the LA ports, 21-year-old Alyssa Drinkard was caught in a conveyor belt on March 14 and killed at the Club Car plant in Evans, Georgia. On March 12, 32-year-old Dakota Austin Cline was entangled in machinery and killed at the Georgia-Pacific Camas Mill in the state of Washington.
As the Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for US vice president, I urge LA port workers to organize an independent investigation into the death of this worker. This is because workers can place no confidence that the International Longshore and Warehouse Union bureaucracy or federal and state authorities will produce anything but a whitewash.
OSHA and its state affiliates only have 1,850 inspectors to cover more than 8 million workplaces employing 130 million workers. This is enough to inspect workplaces once every 190 years.
The current OSHA budget amounts to $3.99 to protect each worker. But the two corporate-controlled parties spend more than a trillion dollars each year on war. Biden is seeking billions more to send bombs to Israel for the mass slaughter of Palestinians and to provoke WWIII with Russia and China.
The responsibility for these deaths also lies with the labor bureaucrats who run the ILWU and other unions—they have spent decades collaborating with corporate management and suppressing the efforts of workers to protect their lives, including during the current COVID pandemic.
SEP presidential candidate Joe Kishore and I are fighting to expand the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) to coordinate the struggle by workers to enforce safety standards. We are fighting for socialism to end the subordination of workers’ lives to corporate profit once and for all.