When I was a boy, my uncle told me about the canary. On a tour of the abandoned Pennsylvania coal mine in which he had spent most of his working life, he told me that when the canary stopped singing it was time to get out of the mine.

Anyone who has ever owned a canary knows that the little birds are nonstop singers. Coal miners used to take a canary with them down into the mines. If dangerously explosive gases were present in the mine, their fumes killed the bird and silenced his song. The miners were warned by the silence that their own lives were in danger.

Miners no longer use canaries. Modern technology has provided more sophisticated warning systems. Yet, accidents still occur. Carelessness, lack of training, physical exhaustion, cost-cutting, defective equipment, and improper work practices are some of the factors that contribute to occupational injuries and illnesses in mines and many other industries. Millions of Americans suffer from job-related illnesses or accidents.

I know what you're thinking. "What has this got to do with me? I don't even know a miner."

There are many high-risk jobs that can cause injuries and death besides mining. Logging, fishing, construction, farming, and fire fighting are just a few. But you don't have to be employed in high-risk jobs to experience occupational accidents and diseases.

Secretaries, computer operators, writers, musicians, and assembly line workers may suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome--a painful disorder of the wrist caused by repetitive motions and correctable only through surgery. Teachers, office workers, and store clerks are sometimes inflicted with headaches, allergies, and asthma caused by poor indoor air quality. Painters and factory workers may suffer from headaches or depression as a result of their use of solvents, cleaners, and degreasers. Some of these materials may also cause cancer. Doctors, nurses, aides, and other hospital workers are daily at risk of contracting hepatitis, AIDS, and other infectious diseases. Sales and customer service workers strain their eyes watching video display terminals all day. Even salesmen, talking on cellular car phones, may be at some risk of developing cancer of the brain caused by electromagnetic radiation. The same may be true for police officers using handheld radar detectors.

In short, anyone who works for a living is risking his good health, perhaps his life, because of job-related illnesses and injuries. There is no reason why millions of Americans each year should become ill or injured on the job. The risk to our health and well-being, caused by an unsafe workplace, is something we have come to take for granted, believing that the conditions cannot change, that's just the way it is.

We have been lulled by our own ignorance and the interests of corporate profitability into a sense of false security about the workplace. We believe it is handguns, crime in the streets, auto accidents, high-cholesterol diets that will do us in, not our jobs.

The canaries would sing the truth. They would tell us that we have to take responsibility for the 56,000 Americans who will die this year from job-related accidents or illnesses. Many more will be injured, maimed, or left with the seed of a fatal disease growing within them.

Where are the canaries? Who will warn us?

--John B. Kachuba


The Invisible Environment

Every nine minutes, someone is killed by their job.

A little quick math and that number translates into 56,000 deaths each year, almost as many deaths in one year as the number of American fatalities in Vietnam throughout the war's duration. In 1994, employers reported 6.3 million disabling work injuries and 515,000 cases of occupational disease.

Americans today are very health conscious. We try to improve our health by dieting and exercise, by giving up tobacco and alcohol, and by reducing our cholesterol levels and blood pressure, but we pay little attention to substances and activities at our jobs that can kill us outright or deliver us a slow, lingering death. Worst of all, we do not even recognize these silent killers.

We know how poorly or well we treat our bodies and we understand the dangers to our health caused by pollution and the destruction of our natural environment. We read about the threat to virgin forests and the spotted owl, wetlands and manatees, and we do what we can to help. We donate money or join the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, or any one of hundreds of organizations dedicated to saving our natural environment and natural resources. We mobilize in grassroots groups to stop local threats to the environment, such as unwanted toxic waste sites, oil pipelines, dams, and the desecration of wilderness areas. We do all these things because we understand that a poisoned environment will poison us. But we ignore our workplace environment.

Even those experts who should be warning us about workplace hazards remain dangerously ignorant of them. Environmentalists easily recognize hazards to plants and animals caused by soil erosion, air and water pollution, and deforestation. They blame industry for much of this damage yet they seem unable to include the workplace environment in a broader definition of "environment." They see industrial pollutants pouring into rivers, leaving fish belly-up, but they fail to see the many workers, exposed to these same pollutants on the job, who will die or suffer serious health consequences as a result of their exposures.

They do not see the thousands who will be stricken with respiratory diseases, cancer, neurological diseases, reproductive disorders, and a host of other ailments simply as a result of working. There is an interconnectedness between the natural and workplace environments that must be put into perspective. The interconnectedness lies in the fact that we cannot separate our lives neatly into one environment or the other. What we do at our jobs, the pollutants and destruction that we create through our work, will have a damaging impact upon the natural environment that boomerangs back to us in the form of serious health effects caused by poisoned air and water, pesticide-sprayed fruits and vegetables, depletion of the ozone layer, and a host of other ailments. Controls must remain in place to protect our natural environment from industrial damage, not only to protect our plant and animal life, but to protect our lives.

The disasters at Bhopal and Chernobyl, in which thousands died, left behind many more with serious health effects, and the surrounding countryside was contaminated, never to be used again. These serve as tragic examples of industrial destruction. They remind us that what goes wrong in our workplace environment can destroy the natural environment and surrounding communities as well. Occupational safety and health must become the concern of everyone.

But we must understand that the greatest risk to our health occurs every day, in the workplace. We do not need tragic, headline-making accidents in order to become a victim of an unsafe workplace. In most cases, toxins in the workplace are insidious, nibbling away at our health bit by bit. Frequently, we do not find out what is happening to us until it is too late. Sometimes we never find out at all.