The Jobs That Still Kill

Editor's note: this is a sample article. The text is placeholder copy and the byline is fictional; it is here to show how articles appear on the site.

Every country keeps a list of the people who went to work and did not come home. In nearly all of them, the great majority of the names belong to men.

This is not a mystery. The most dangerous occupations — fishing, logging, roofing, mining, long-distance driving — are still done mostly by men. What is strange is how rarely the fact is discussed as a question about men at all.

Risk as a job description

Danger at work is often described as a choice, compensated by higher pay. Sometimes it is. More often the choice is narrow: these are the jobs available in a particular place to a person with particular qualifications.

Nobody takes a job on a trawler because they like the odds. They take it because it is the job there is.

What safety looks like

The history of workplace safety is a history of unglamorous rules: guard rails, rest breaks, harnesses, inspections that actually happen. Each one was resisted as impractical before it became ordinary.¹

Two things would help most:

1. Treating fatigue as seriously as equipment failure.
2. Making it safe — socially as well as legally — for a worker to stop a job.

A culture that admires men for enduring risk will keep producing men who do not report it.