Two Chicago construction workers were electrocuted Tuesday morning while working on the newly built Grace Manor Apartments in Lawndale on the city’s West Side.
A 33-year-old construction worker died from his injuries. A 26-year-old worker was rushed to a local hospital and was reported in good condition and recovering. The names of the workers have not been released.
Both workers were on a mobile elevated work platform, about five stories high, attaching metal framing to the outside of the building. The equipment and building materials connected with power lines, energizing the platform and setting it on fire. The 33-year-old touched the railing of the lift and was electrocuted, according to police.
Witnesses told local ABC7 News, “You just feel so helpless at that point, because it’s like, you know you want to help, but it’s nothing you can do. My heart just goes out to the whole work team here.”
Paramedics and firefighters waited for ComEd to halt the flow of electricity in order to extinguish the fire and then take the workers to hospitals.
The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has launched a six-month investigation of the employer, Interlayer Corp. as well as Burling Builders, Inc., who served as the general contractors for the building. The contractors could be found in violation of OSHA Standard 1926.20(b)—employer accident prevention responsibilities. These include identifying electrical hazards while operating equipment near an energized overhead power line.
The OSHA investigation will likely result in at most a token fine. OSHA’s maximum penalties in 2025 for serious and other-than-serious violations is $16,550 per violation, and maximum penalty for willful or repeated violations is $165,514 per violation.
Fines amounting to a few thousand dollars are merely a cost of doing business and do not fundamentally impact large, deep-pocketed employers. The project the two workers were killed on cost an estimated $40 million.
Last year, two Chicago construction workers, David O’Donnell, age 27, and Jeffrey Spyrka, age 36, fell nine stories from a scaffolding at a construction site at the University of Chicago Medical Center campus, resulting in the death of O’Donnell and critically injuring Spyrka, who somehow survived. The result of the OSHA investigation into that incident was a fine for two companies—$41,480 for Turner Construction and $32,264 for New Horizon Steel. Last year, a 24-year-old man was killed when sheet metal fell on him at DPR Manufacturing in Michigan, a death that resulted in an insulting fine of just $7,000.
In an another tragedy, 28-year-old Caterpillar worker Daulton Simmers was killed within seconds by molten metal at the Mapleton, Illinois Caterpillar foundry near Peoria. The foundry has a record of unsafe conditions, and three workers have died there in the last few years. The $145,000 fine by OSHA for the death of Steven Dierkes, another worker at the same foundry who fell into a vat of molten metal and died of “thermal annihilation,” was immediately contested by Caterpillar.
Industrial deaths are increasingly frequent, due to lax regulations and the lack of any real oversight or enforcement of safety rules by pro-company unions.
In the United States, thousands of workers die or are injured every year. Across all industries, a worker died every 99 minutes from a work-related injury in 2023, the last tally of workplace deaths reported.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics documented 5,283 fatal work injuries in 2023, a 4.2 percent decrease from 2022. These figures show what a slaughterhouse American factories and industries have become, as companies coin massive profits at the expense of their workers’ lives and health.
In the construction industry alone, fatalities have hit their highest number in more than a decade, with 1,075 deaths in 2023.
With the Trump administration looking to gut even the meager protections federal regulatory agencies give, such as OSHA, this trend will only intensify with the full complicity of the trade union bureaucracies and the capitalist political parties.