How cheap is a life?

The oweners of capital in the United States have successfully transferred most of the costs of industrial casualties onto the working class and the public at large. This has been accomplished by the creation of the privately owened workers' compensation insurance system and the corporate-dominated safety establishment. This "compensation-safety establishment" has been able to take over most of the federal apparatus created by the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. Nevertheless, workers and unions and their allies have begun to challenge the establishment's hegemony over job health and safety policy for the first time in seventy years.