Equal Occupational Fatality Day

After this month’s coal mine explosion and oil refinery explosion and oil rig explosion, I was thinking of writing something on this topic, but by way of Derbyshire, here is something already available at the Enterprise Blog by Mark J. Perry:

To promote its position of gender pay equity, the NCPE [National Committee on Pay Equity] annually publicizes “Equal Pay Day,” upcoming next week on Tuesday, April 20. According to the NCPE:

This date symbolizes how far into 2010 women must work to earn what men earned in 2009. Because women earn less, on average, than men, they must work longer for the same amount of pay. Equal Pay Day was originated by the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) in 1996 as a public awareness event to illustrate the gap between men’s and women’s wages.

Inspired by Equal Pay Day, and in recognition of the significant gender differences in workplace deaths, let me propose the creation of “Equal Occupational Fatality Day,” which will occur next on October 11, 2021. That date symbolizes how long women will have to work before they experience the same loss of life from work-related deaths that men experienced in 2008. Because most women work in much safer occupations than men, they must work about 13 years longer than men to experience the same number of occupational fatalities. Equal Occupational Fatality Day is being originated to illustrate the gap between men’s and women’s occupational deaths, and bring awareness to the fact that closing the pay gap would also close the work-related death gap and expose thousands of women to occupational fatalities each year.

May that Equal Occupational Fatality Day shall always be over a decade away.