Corporations are responsible for the deaths of far more persons than are killed by individuals. Hundreds of thousands of worker and consumer injuries, some of which are deadly serious, are caused by corporate actions. Plant workers may receive injuries in accidents in an unsafe workplace or become ill from a work-related disease; in other cases, consumers of corporate products are hurt directly through unsafe or even dangerous products. In addition, millions of persons may become ill because of industrial air pollution, by improper waste disposal from factories, and through other forms of environmental contamination. Yet the public is far more fearful of street muggers than of polluters and dumpers. People are much less afraid of dying a slow death from air pollution, chemical exposure, or cigarette smoking than of violent injury or death at the hands of a street criminal. One expert asserted that corporate "crimes against health and safety are frightening, shocking and disturbing."  (Frank, 1985, p. 84)

 Over a period of two years during the 1970s, journalist Rachel Scott visited a number of Fortune 500 plants, including Ford, Chrysler, and Mobil Oil. (Scott, 1974, p. 293) She described a horrendous situation: Workers were frequently killed and often badly injured in preventable plant accidents due to faulty equipment and inadequate safety procedures. Unnecessary exposure to vinyl chloride and other chemicals such as silica resulted in eath and illness to many plant employees. Two well-known writers on business issues commented on her work:

    She concluded that corporations have the resources to measure and control industrial hazards. Yet now as throughout American history, companies such as these shrug at the pleas of workers whose health they destroy in order to save money. They hire experts -- physicians and researchers -- who purposely misdiagnose industrial diseases as the ordinary diseases of life, write biased reports, and divert research from vital questions. They fight against regulations as unnecessary and cry that it will bring ruination. (Mintz and Cohen, 1976, pp. 335-36)

Corporations often disregard the health of workers in order to save money. For example, Allied Chemical knew, from its own laboratory research, that its chemical pesticide Kepone, which is similar to DDT, could cause serious injuries, including cancer. (Stone, 1987, pp. 121-132) Still, they produced and marketed the deadly substance, thus poisoning many workers. The affected workers suffered from severe tension, weight loss, tenderness of the liver, brain damage, chest pains, and walking difficulties.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1987 a total of 2,212,600 manufacturing workers were injured on the job. Allowing for inadequate reporting, about 1,000 manufacturing workers were killed on the job. According to a 1989 report of the National Safe Workplace Institute, more workers are killed on the job in the United States than in most other major industrialized countries of the world. In this country, workers are 36 times more likely to be killed than are workers in Sweden, and nine times more likely to be killed than in England. The Institute estimates that these deaths cost the U.S. economy $15 billion each year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that work days lost in the manufacturing industry due to on-the-job injuries in 1987 were 16,293,700. Still, these statistics do not give the full picture, since corporations, like other employers, are solely responsible for reporting job-related injuries and diseases. The evidence suggests that many grossly underreport the cases, largely because a lower number of such incidents makes for a better corporate image; it also reduces corporate insurance costs and discourages visits from government inspectors. (Berman, 1978) In 1986, for example, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined Chrysler $910,000 for failure to report many accidents at one of their large plants, and they fined Caterpillar Tractor $776,000 on similar charges. OSHA assessed General Dynamics a fine of $615,000 in 1987 for willfully underreporting job injuries and illness at its Rhode Island submarine-building yard. As another example, Kohler Company was fined $1,398,000 in 1988 for inadequate record-keeping of employee injuries. . .

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