We know we live in an outstanding state. It seems that not a week goes by without a new study, survey, ranking or analysis that says Washington is number one for this, or in the top five for that.
Despite the constant whining from some quarters that Washingtonians are heavily taxed, for example, numerous organizations and think tanks – some extremely conservative – place us at the other end of the spectrum by actually looking at the facts.
And despite a similarly continuous message from the right that our state, for some bizarre and unstated reason, is anti-business, we’re ranked among the most business-friendly states in the U.S (Forbes, March 2013).
Unmatched quality of life. Great place to retire. No better state to raise healthy children. And now, a new report from the AFL-CIO contains the good news that Washington has the 3rd-lowest number of workplace fatalities in the nation. The latest figures available, for 2011, tell us that the workplace death rate was 1.9 per 100,000, barely half the national rate of 3.5 per 100,000.
Why? It looks like a confluence of several factors. Certainly, Washington is fortunate not to have an economy based on some of the obviously dangerous industries – steel-production, coal-mining, etc. – that dominate some regions. (But those two professions actually are safer – overall – than logging and commercial fishing, two Washington mainstays.)
And we’ve benefited from the presence of strong unions, whose efforts to improve workplace safety have paid off over the last century.
Some of the credit should go to Washingtonians themselves, who’ve had the good sense over the last several decades to keep Democrats in office much of the time. Session after session, the Democratic Legislature has worked to keep citizens healthy.
Among the most recent was a bill in 2011, the same year as the AFL-CIO study, that requires a business cited for a serious or willful safety violation to fix it, rather than to appeal the citation endlessly without making an effort to make a correction.
There’s still more to be done. Just as we celebrate the fact that drunk-driving deaths are down by 35 percent over the last decade while realizing that 100 percent is the only acceptable figure, we can brag about our safe workplaces while trying to make them even safer.
Jobs are vital, and as we rebound from the world-wide recession, a primary goal is to help create more of them. And even better is a job where a mom or dad who heads for work in the morning has an excellent chance of coming home at night in one piece.