Boss Tries To Brush Off Death On The Job, Workers Retaliate

While everyone has a horrible boss story, there are unlucky souls out there who can truly claim to have the worst ones. Because no matter how bad your day is, most of us don’t expect to deal with possible deaths while going about our 9-to-5.

An employeeshared his experienceabout learning that a coworker had died on the job and then being told to just continue working. Instead, he and many of his colleagues decided to walk. Readers shared their own tales of cruel and inhumane jobs and managers and debated why in the world working conditions have gotten so bad.

While jobs can be hard, there are still some things most people will find unacceptable

Boss Tries To Brush Off Death On The Job, Workers Retaliate

Image credits:karrastock (not the actual photo)

One man was told to keep working when a colleague passed away on site

Boss Tries To Brush Off Death On The Job, Workers Retaliate

Image credits:drazenphoto (not the actual photo)

Boss Tries To Brush Off Death On The Job, Workers Retaliate

OP reported the entire thing to OSHA

Image credits:Sgt_Dirty_Dan

While burnout, stress, and depression might all be the results of a bad job site, manual labor like the lumber mill OP works in does need to have some real safety standards. In the US, this is why agencies such as OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) exist. While in a perfect world, workplaces would self-regulate to ensure that employees are not overburdened to the point that they die on-site, experience (and stories like OP’s) show that this won’t just happen naturally.

This is why, over a hundred years ago, the US government set up certain workplace safety guides to help limit workplace injuries and deaths. Industrialization and the need to build tanks, weapons, and ships during the Second World War led to an increase in injury, as people had to work around massive amounts of machinery. Injured workers were obviously bad for productivity, particularly if they possessed some valuable industrial skill. However, it wasn’t until after 1945 that labor unions began to more aggressivelypush for worker protections.

Management has to be forced to care about workers

So OP was absolutely in the right for reporting this particular workplace. While we don’t know the whole picture, it’s hard to not see how this amount of strain caused his coworkers to collapse on the job. And this is not a case of this person simply not being up to such physical work, commenters suggested that the weight was simply too high, something management did little to nothing to fix. Fortunately, workers are becoming more aware of just how poorly management takes care of them. One study found that around half of the people who voluntarily quit their jobs blamed management for abad working environment.

While this often refers to toxic practices like unpaid overtime and verbal abuse, OP’s story is a solid reminder that there are workplaces where a greedy boss can and will cause serious bodily harm to employees. Remember, until it was madeFederal law in 1916, there were no laws around the length of time a person could be “made” to work. Management won’t ever do the right thing unless there is significant regulatory pressure.