Posted with permission from Confined Space, a newsletter of workplace safety and labor issues.
COSHCON17 — The Young and the Active — The National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, the umbrella group of all the nation’s COSH groups held its annual conference last week and I was privileged to be able to chair a very moving panel on “Lessons from Workplace Fatalities” with some of my heroes: family activist Katherine Rodriguez, whose father, Ray Gonzales was killed in a fire at BP Texas City in 2004, Tonya Ford, director the United Support and Memorial for Workplace Fatalities, whose uncle Robert “Bobby” Fitch fell to his death at an Archer Daniel Midland plant in 2009, and Jonathan Karmel, author of Dying to Work: Death and Injury in the American Workplace.