Quick--what are the most dangerous jobs in the U.S.?
We know what most people would say, and it's wrong.
A steady diet of television would convince anyone that cops have the most dangerous occupation. But the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics put out a list of the Top Ten Most Dangerous Jobs in 2000, and the fuzz are not on it. The list is based on how many job-related fatalities occurred for every 100,000 workers employed in each job category.
Timber cutters are killed the most--122.1 per 100,000. Fishers are next, with 108.3. Airplane pilots are third. Construction workers of various kinds come in fourth, sixth, and seventh. Extractive occupations--miners, oil rig workers--are fifth. Truck drivers and drivers/sales workers are a surprising eight and nine on the list. Farm occupations are tenth, at 25.1 deaths per 100,000.
The police are off the chart, with a death rate of only about 9 per 100,000.
When it comes to earnings, however, things are quite different. According to the BLS, those who fell trees had a median wage of $12.33 an hour in 2000; heavy truck and tractor-trailer drivers, who do better than drivers of smaller vehicles, had median hourly earnings of $15.25.
Farmworkers, as usual, were on the bottom with median weekly earnings of $309. Fishers did somewhat better: between $300 and $750 a week.
Most of these occupations, however, are seasonal. So yearly earnings for farmworkers, fishers and timber cutters are not a simple multiple of what they might get per week. And they are much less likely to have benefits than other job categories.
Police and sheriff's patrol officers, however, usually get a yearly salary with benefits. Their median annual earnings in 2000 were $39,790. For police and detective supervisors, that rose to $57,210. This is not counting other perks of the job.
If police are better paid presumably because of the risks of their jobs, why don't workers in vital industries who risk being crushed, drowned, poisoned, electrocuted and caught in machinery receive decent compensation for what they do?
Tens of millions of workers are in these high-risk occupations. When they are killed on the job, their families, friends and co-workers attend their funerals and memorial events. There is grief and dignity among the survivors. But when do you see that on the nightly news?
It is amazing how invisible the working class has become in the U.S. media. Whether in life or in death, workers are either a subject of comic relief or just don't get mentioned at all. Books and plays about workers' struggles are considered "passé." Movies like "Silkwood" or "Erin Brockovich" are the rare exceptions that prove the rule.
The fascination is with rich people and murder--cops, courts, bounty hunters, judges, district attorneys, you name it. This is supposedly where the action is. The bosses of the billion-dollar entertainment industry couldn't care less about the complex and fascinating lives of the millions who work at all-too-perilous jobs, like those listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Source: Worker's World News Service
