By Scott Van Voorhis, Boston Herald, Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Gone fishing has too often meant gone missing for the seafarers who brave the waves off the Massachusetts coast to bring in the daily catch, a new report finds.

Forty-one Bay State fishermen have lost their lives since 2000, making it the state's most dangerous occupation this decade, the Massachusetts AFL-CIO and MassCOSH, a workplace safety group, find in their annual report on death in the workplace. That includes seven fishermen alone in 2007.

Overall, 80 workers in industries ranging from commercial fishing to construction lost their lives last year, the most since 2003, the report finds. The AFL-CIO and MassCOSH, the Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health, are pointing to the grim statistics as they push for stricter workplace safety rules on the state and federal levels.

"It's an absolute outrage that, in this day and age, we have such a high number of lives lost on the job," said Robert Haynes, president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, in a statement.

Fishing has lots of competition when it comes to dangerous jobs in Massachusetts.

Twenty Massachusetts workers who died last year worked in the construction trades, 13 worked in transportation, five worked for utilities and three worked for auto repair shops. Nine firefighters also died in the line of duty.

Truck and auto crashes, on the job or heading to the job, were a top cause of death. Falls accounted for a quarter of last year's workplace fatalities, most of them in the construction industry. Four workers were electrocuted, while six suffered heart attacks on the job.

Immigrant workers were disproportionately represented among the victims, many taken advantage of by unscrupulous contractors. The federal government's main workplace safety regulator, OSHA, is understaffed and can't levy large enough fines to make an impact, the report argues

Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/business/general/view.bg?articleid=1090410 [1]