Kentucky’s worker safety program failed to properly investigate nearly every on-the-job death for two years. The victims were tree trimmers, public-works employees, construction workers, home health aides. They died in jobs everyone knows to be dangerous and in jobs you might attend every day without considering whether you’d make it home. But in almost every case, the state’s Occupational Safety and Health program didn’t do enough to determine if a business was responsible for unsafe conditions — never mind actually hold them accountable. With a record like that, you’d think this issue would be in every newspaper and on every politician’s lips. But virtually no one outside the agency and advocacy world was clued in until we published “Fatal Flaws,” our comprehensive investigation into these failings. KyCIR’s Eleanor Klibanoff dug into Federal Annual Monitoring and Evaluation (or FAME) Reports, obscure federal documents even longtime labor reporters have never heard of, and found astounding proof: the feds meticulously documented the ways in which the state-run program isn’t meeting federal standards. We were not satisfied to put out a story about a federal report, though, however unknown or damning. Klibanoff combed through thousands of pages of records to learn the names, employers and circumstances of every death in a two-year span so we could detail each on our website. Along with our collaborators at the Ohio Valley ReSource and the Center for Public Integrity, we brought this issue to the forefront through interviews with the families left behind, without their loved one and without resolution. We put Kentucky in the context of a few other troubled programs across the country. And we brought our findings to legislators on the state’s labor committees. None of them were familiar with the well-documented failings of the Kentucky Labor Cabinet to run its occupational safety program.
