Many workers have been hurt or even killed on the job, so they want construction sites to be safer. A building worker from Houston, Texas, named Antonio spoke out about getting hurt on the job.
He said that he wasn’t given any safety gear at work, so he fell and hit his ankle on a nail. He washed the cut with hydrogen peroxide and said he would “take him to the doctor the next day.” Antonio’s swelling got too bad after he got home, and as his symptoms got worse, he drove himself to the emergency room.
Doctors told him that they would have to cut off his limbs in just a few minutes. He said, “I was in the hospital for sixteen days.” He kept saying that the worker hadn’t answered the phone with him until about two weeks later when he called to “see if he was ready to work.”
400,000 workers, including Antonio, have dealt with this. It is known that almost nine hundred people died in 2022.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) says that employers must keep workers from getting hurt or sick at work. “The construction business is dangerous, but falls can be avoided.” “We know how to stop these things from happening,” says Ryan Paperiello, a safety and health expert for the Laborers’ Health and Safety Fund of North America.
Often, the OSHA rules are not being followed in the first place when these accidents or deaths happen. Furthermore, professionals say that many individuals are not ready to speak out and say that what they are doing or being asked to do is unsafe.
A lot of building workers have said that they don’t get enough breaks or water while they’re working, and they also don’t have enough safety gear or protection. Another major reason why many workers don’t speak out about this is the fear of being punished or not being able to work again.
