Oil and gas workers in North Dakota are six times more likely to die on the job than their peers in other states as inexperienced workers join the state’s oil and gas boom, according to a report by a labor group. 
 
 In North Dakota, 104 out of every 100,000 oil, gas and mining workers died of job-related injuries in 2012, according to a report today from the AFL-CIO labor federation. North Dakota had the highest fatality rate at 17.7 per 100,000 workers across all sectors, the AFL-CIO said, citing data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 
 
 North Dakota’s petroleum industry employed 40,856 people in 2011, up from 5,051 in 2005, a year before the oilfield expansion began with techniques such as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. To support the surge, inexperienced workers have entered the industry, in some cases without proper training, said Peg Seminario, the AFL-CIO director of safety and health. 
 
 “You have a lot of workers coming into the state,” Seminario said on a conference call with reporters. “It’s an incredibly dangerous industry and needs much more attention.” 
 
 The American Petroleum Institute, the Washington-based trade group for the oil industry, stresses the need for safe workplaces, Carlton Carroll, an institute spokesman, said in response to an e-mail seeking comment on the AFL-CIO report. 
 
 Update Standards 
 
 “We are proud of our strong safety record, but even one incident is too many,” Carroll said. “We work tirelessly to update our standards and best practices on an ongoing basis to improve our record and protect employees and our environment.” 
 
 Fatalities among the state’s oil and gas workers suggests a need for greater oversight, the AFL-CIO’s Seminario said. Workplace safety is overseen by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, part of the Labor Department, which has eight inspectors for North Dakota, she said. 
 
 By comparison, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, which oversees underground and surface mines, inspects coal mines four times a year. 
 
 “We may need a different approach in oil and gas than we have right now, one that’s more akin to mining,” Seminario said. 
 
 In 2012, 4,628 workers died on the job while about 50,000 died from occupational diseases, according to the federation’s report. The fatality rate has been mostly flat since 2008. 
 
 The U.S. has about 1,955 federal and state OSHA inspectors to oversee 8 million workplaces. That translates into one inspector for every 67,847 workers. 
 
 When safety violations are found, penalties are low, according to the report. The median fine in cases with a death in fiscal year 2013 was $5,600 by federal OSHA and $6,100 under state plans. 
 
 To contact the reporter on this story: Jim Efstathiou Jr. in New York at jefstathiou@bloomberg.net 
 
 To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jon Morgan at jmorgan97@bloomberg.net Steve Geimann ||||| This 2016 edition of Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect marks the 25th year the AFL-CIO has produced a report on the state of safety and health protections for America’s workers. 
 
 More than 532,000 workers now can say their lives have been saved since the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, which promised workers in this country the right to a safe job. Since that time, workplace safety and health conditions have improved but at the same time some conditions have gotten worse and too many workers remain at serious risk of injury, illness or death. 
 
 The High Toll of Job Injuries, Illnesses and Deaths 
 
 In 2014, 4,821 workers were killed on the job in the United States, and an estimated 50,000 died from occupational diseases, resulting in a loss of 150 workers each day from hazardous working conditions. Older workers are at a greater risk. Thirty-five percent of all fatalities occurred in workers age 55 or older, and workers 65 or older have three times the risk of dying on the job as other workers. The oil and gas industry remains very dangerous--the fatality rate for oil and gas extraction is nearly five times the national average. States with prominent oil and gas industries continue to be among the most dangerous states to work. Latino workers continue to be at higher risk than other workers. There were 804 Latino workers killed on the job in 2014, 64% of whom were immigrant workers. Workplace violence is a serious and growing problem for workers, especially for health care professionals and women, who suffered 66% of the lost-time injuries related to workplace violence. 
 
 Job Safety Oversight and Enforcement 
 
 Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) resources are still too few and declining with only 1,840 federal and state inspectors to inspect 8 million workplaces. This means there are enough inspectors for federal OSHA to inspect workplaces once every 145 years, on average, and state OSHA plans have enough to inspect workplaces once every 97 years. 
 
 Despite a new law that will allow OSHA to increase its penalties for workplace safety and health violations, penalties are still too weak to be an effective deterrent for some employers and large corporations. 
 
 Regulatory Action 
 
 After years of delay, the Obama administration has moved forward to issue key safety and health regulations: 
 
 In 2016, OSHA issued a final silica standard to reduce dust exposures in general industry, maritime and construction sectors. This rule will prevent more than 600 deaths and 1,000 cases of silicosis each year. 
 
 In 2015, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) issued a final rule to reduce coal dust exposure limits and require continuous monitoring of dust in underground coal mines. This rule will help prevent thousands of new cases of black lung. 
 
 Many other rules are long overdue, including OSHA rules on injury reporting, beryllium, combustible dust and infectious disease, and MSHA rules on proximity detection for mobile equipment and silica. 
 
 Much Work Remains to Be Done 
 
 Very simply, workers need more job safety and health protection. 
 
 The serious safety and health problems faced by Latino, immigrant and aging workers must be given increased attention. 
 
 Funding and staffing at job safety agencies should be increased. 
 
 Ergonomic hazards, infectious diseases and chemical exposures pose serious risks to workers, but are largely unregulated. 
 
 Workplace violence is a growing and serious threat—particularly to women workers and workers in the health care industry—that necessitates enhanced enforcement and development of an OSHA workplace violence standard. 
 
 The escalating fatalities and injuries in the oil and gas extraction industry demand intensive and comprehensive intervention. 
 
 Employer policies and practices that discourage the reporting of injuries through discipline or other means must be prohibited. 
 
 Congress should pass the Protecting America’s Workers Act to extend the Occupational Safety and Health Act’s coverage to workers who are currently excluded, strengthen civil and criminal penalties for violations, enhance antidiscrimination protections, and strengthen the rights of workers, unions and victims. 
 
 The nation must renew the commitment to protect workers from injury, disease and death and make this a high priority. We must demand that employers meet their responsibilities to protect workers and hold them accountable if they put workers in danger. Only then can the promise of safe jobs for all of America’s workers be fulfilled. 
 
 Read the full report: Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect, 2016 ||||| Looking for news you can trust? 
 
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 Fracking has done some incredible things for North Dakota: It has the fastest-growing economy and lowest unemployment in the nation, and it is second only to Texas in churning out oil. But as with any gold rush, the boom comes with a human cost for those involved—illness, injury, and fatalities. (For a firsthand view of conditions in North Dakota’s fracking fields, watch the video above, which we produced in 2012.) 
 
 In fact, across all industries, North Dakota has the least-safe working conditions of any state in the country, according to federal data compiled in a new report from the AFL-CIO. The report ranked North Dakota dead last for workplace safety. (Massachusetts ranked the most safe.) North Dakota had by far the highest overall workplace fatality rate, 17.7 deaths per 100,000 workers—about five times higher than the national average. According to the report, that’s one of the highest fatality rates ever reported in any state. 
 
 The rise in fatality rates coincides with the state’s oil and gas boom: In 2007, before the boom was really underway, the rate was 7 deaths per 100,000 workers, still on the high end but not exceptional. The chart below shows how that rate began to skyrocket in 2010-11, just as oil production began to surge as well. 
 
 Of the 65 people killed on the job in North Dakota in 2012, 15 worked in the mining and oil and gas industry. Another 25 worked in construction. Some jobs that are classified as construction are in fact linked directly to oil and gas operations, like the workers who build well pad sites and roads before the actual drilling begins. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics records aren’t granular enough to know exactly how many construction workers were killed doing jobs related to the oil and gas boom.) 
 
 A spokesperson for the North Dakota Petroleum Council pointed to a slight drop in premium rates for the state’s worker’s comp program as evidence that “workplace safety has improved,” but the BLS data compiled in the AFL-CIO report tell a different story. 
 
 As blue-collar workers flooded the state for an essentially limitless number of high-paying, risky jobs driving trucks and working on fracking rigs at a breakneck pace, the energy industry’s fatality rate in North Dakota climbed to unbelievable heights. According to the report, in 2012 the mining and oil and gas sector rate was 104 deaths per 100,000 workers, six times the national average; in the construction sector, the rate was 97.4 per 100,000, almost 10 times the national average. 
 
 “North Dakota, clearly by the data, has much more significant problems and issues” than other oil-producing states, AFL-CIO Director of Safety and Health Peg Seminario said. “The industry is more established in other states; in North Dakota this is a relatively recent phenomenon.” 
 
 Seminario said the bad record can be attributed to the large number of workers coming into the industry who are relatively inexperienced and untrained, as well as the fact that many oil and gas companies in the state are startups that may not have rigorous safety standards in place. At the same time, Seminario said, on-the-ground inspection by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has suffered from budget cuts. 
 
 As we’ve reported in the past, one of the most dangerous places to work in a fracking boom isn’t on the rig itself, but behind the wheel of one of the thousands of trucks needed to transport fresh and waste water, chemicals, and oil. Of North Dakota’s 65 workplace fatalities in all industries in 2012, 40 were classified as transportation-related; the proportion was similar on the national level. Exposure to dangerous chemicals is also a problem; just last week a 20-year-old man was killed on a North Dakota oil well site, possibly by exposure to toxic hydrogen sulfide gas, according to the local sheriff’s department. Silica dust, a toxic byproduct of fracking operations, is often found at unsafe concentrations at well sites, and remains unregulated by OSHA despite being linked to a number of fatal diseases. Indeed, the most serious long-term health impacts of fracking operations are just beginning to be studied, and some health experts are worried that incidents of industry-related disease could increase in coming decades. 
 
 “This is going to be a sector that continues to grow, and it’s so dangerous,” Seminario said. “Much more oversight is needed.”
– With the nation's fastest-growing economy and lowest unemployment rate, it's no wonder North Dakota is the happiest state in the country—but it's also the deadliest for workers. According to a new report from the AFL-CIO, oil and gas workers are six times more likely to die on the job in North Dakota than in other states, Bloomberg reports. The state is at the bottom of the heap for workplace safety, with 17.7 deaths per 100,000 workers across all sectors in 2012. That's not just five times higher than the national average, but one of the highest fatality rates ever reported. Massachusetts ranked best with 1.4 deaths per 100,000 workers. So should we all avoid work in North Dakota? Not quite—though you may want to think twice about a career in the state's booming oil and gas industry. In the mining and oil and gas extraction sector, the rate was 104 deaths per 100,000 workers. Before the industry boomed, the rate across the board was 7 deaths per 100,000. Of the 65 North Dakotans who died on the job in 2012, 15 worked in mining, oil, and gas, while another 25 were in construction, which can include some jobs on oil and gas sites. But why is the rate higher than in other oil-producing states? "The industry is more established in other states; in North Dakota this is a relatively recent phenomenon" involving inexperienced and untrained workers, AFL-CIO's director of safety and health says, per Mother Jones.