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Over the decade that followed, an average of seventeen American workers died each day from occupational injuries. By the early 1990s, this had increased to twenty- eight. Capitalism kills. Despite solid criminal cases, in no instance has any employer who knowingly and willfully violated federal regulations which resulted in workers' deaths ever been imprisoned. It is cheaper for companies to allow their workers to be killed than to create safer working environments.
In a 1993 FBI report analyzing 1991 work-related fatalities in New York City found homicide to be the leading cause of death on the job. Although in its analysis of job-related fatalities in 32 states it found only 14 percent of workplace deaths were homicides, we hear more about workers "going postal." The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health reported in 1997 that, on average, four workers are murdered each workday in the United States.
The raising of wages leads to overwork among the workers. The more they want to earn, the more they must sacrifice their time and perform slave labour in which their freedom is totally alienated. ...In so doing they shorten their lives.
...Thus, even in the state of society which is the most favorable to the worker, the inevitable reslt for the worker is overwork and premature death, reduction to a machine, enslavement to capital.
--Karl Marx. 1964. Early Writings. NY:McGraw-Hill, pp. 71,73
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