The rate of workplace fatalities in Wyoming has not improved over the past 20 years. In fact, they spiked in 2023, increasing by 25% to 45 deaths, the most recorded in Wyoming in 16 years. Workplace fatalities have increased in Wyoming every year since 2017.
Marcie Kindred, executive director of Wyoming State AFL-CIO, believes that Gov. Mark Gordon and the Legislature aren’t doing enough to prevent those workplace deaths.
“Every one of those 45 deaths represents a worker who left home expecting to return to their loved ones,” Kindred said. “Every one represents a family forever changed. Every one represents a preventable tragedy that demands our immediate attention. The time for excuses is over. Wyoming workers deserve better.”
In 2023, Wyoming had the highest rate of workplace fatalities per capita in the country at a rate of 16 fatal workplace injuries per 100,000 full-time workers, according to the National Safety Council.
The state of Wyoming only investigates workplace fatalities occurring under Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) jurisdiction. For all others, individual agencies like local law enforcement and the Wyoming Department of Transportation are responsible for investigating fatalities, but that creates silos, making it difficult to identify trends and come up with needed regulations, better policies or other solutions.
Liz Gagen, director of the Wyoming Department of Workforce Services (DWS), told Cowboy State Daily that only six of the 2023 deaths fell under OSHA jurisdiction and the remaining 39 were either related to transportation accidents, drug overdoses, or other areas over which OSHA has no authority. What that means is that Workforce Services has no ability to look into 87% of the workplace deaths that occurred in Wyoming in 2023.
This is the crux of what the AFL-CIO wants resolved: to bring more oversight and problem-solving to what it sees as a gaping hole in Wyoming’s labor laws.
Monday at 5:30 p.m., a Workers Memorial Day will be held at the Wyoming Capitol for people who have become injured or lost their lives while working on a job. At the event, a bell will be rung 45 times for every worker who died in Wyoming in 2023.
Governor’s Response
Michael Pearlman, a spokesperson for the governor, said Gordon takes workplace fatalities very seriously.
“Governor Gordon believes any workforce fatality is too many,” Pearlman said. “These losses are tragedies that he does not take lightly, and the governor believes we should all be working cooperatively to reduce working injury and fatality rates.”
It’s also important to note that the combination of Wyoming’s energy industry-heavy workforce and low population makes the state susceptible to large percentage swings in workplace fatality rates and high per capita rates.
“In Wyoming, our legacy industries are also some of the most dangerous,” Pearlman said. “Protecting our workers in these sectors is a matter that he and his administration take seriously.”
Suicides and homicides are included in the tally, but the total includes deaths that happened place in Wyoming, not just all Wyoming residents who died on the job.
DWS also pointed out in its report that there’s not always a direct relationship between workplace fatalities and safety.
Under state law, Wyoming businesses can work with Workforce Services’ consultation services to be proactive in preventing injuries, but according to DWS, overall workplace incident rates have actually declined since 2012.
Kindred said it’s often cheaper for businesses to take a fine for workplace safety violations rather than pay the cost to actually resolve them. There’s often also little teeth behind a fee once it’s assessed, she said.
“People are not even paying the fines,” she said.
Not A Pretty Picture
Wyoming has consistently ranked top five in the country for rate of workplace deaths since 2003 on a per capita basis.
From 2001 to 2010, the state had an average of 36 workplace deaths per year. Over the next decade, that number started to dip but began picking back up around 2018. No solid answers have come forward as to why the numbers have remained high.
Around 2009, the AFL-CIO started pushing for measures to address the rate of workplace deaths and specifically more tracking of how and where workplace fatalities were occurring in Wyoming.
Marcia Shanor, executive director of the Wyoming Trial Lawyers Association, has been working on the issue since that time and finds the overall trends extremely disappointing.
“I don’t think anything that we worked to accomplish has stayed in place,” Shanor said. “It’s become fewer and there’s less attention.”
Position Created And Then Eliminated
Following the 2009 legislative session, then-Gov. Dave Freudenthal announced the formation of a workplace safety task force.
The task force met several times in 2009 and formed subcommittees focusing on the oil and gas industry, construction, transportation, and data. Ultimately, the task force made three key recommendations prior to the 2010 budget session, but none were taken up by the Legislature, although it did pass an increase in worker’s compensation benefits around this time.
Things looked more promising in 2010 when an epidemiologist position was specifically created to study the issue of workplace deaths in Wyoming. Although it was only a small, incremental change, it was still a sign of progress in the right direction.
The purpose of this role was to create a centralized database studying workplace fatalities.
A centralized figure is important because many different organizations like MSHA, OSHA, the Wyoming Highway Patrol and county sheriff’s departments can have jurisdiction over and investigate workplace injuries and fatalities, often leading to information related to worker deaths scattered and isolated.
The first report to come out of this position offered a very negative outlook on the culture of safety in Wyoming, Shanor said.
Three people have held this position, which was last occupied in 2022.
After the COVID-19 pandemic, restructuring occurred within the governor’s office and the Department of Workforce Services.
Liz Gagen, director of DWS, said it was around this time that her agency determined that many of the epidemiologist position’s responsibilities were duplicative of those already required by her agency and OSHA.
DWS decided to change the role into an OSHA Compliance Assistance position, assisting Wyoming private and public employers in improving workplace safety and guiding them on regulatory compliance issues.
Kindred said none of this excuses the fact that deaths have increased in the state while the state got rid of a job specifically created to address the issue.
“The elimination of the Occupational Epidemiologist position in 2022 in favor of an OSHA Compliance Assistance Specialist may have seemed reasonable at the time, but with fatalities continuing to rise, we question whether this was the right decision,” Kindred said. “Without dedicated resources to analyze workplace fatality patterns beyond simple categorization, how can we develop effective prevention strategies?”
Transportation Particularly Bad
The number of transportation-related deaths increased by 11 from 2022 to 2023 and two-thirds of all the fatalities were transportation-related. OSHA has no jurisdiction over transportation-related incidents, leaving the deaths somewhat in a state of limbo.
It’s this gap in coverage that Kindred wants the governor and the Legislature to specifically address.
In a 2023 letter to the former director of AFL-CIO, Gordon acknowledged more needs to be done to address the labor fatality issue, but it’s not clear what changes, if any, have happened since that time.
A Wyoming Transportation Safety Coalition was formed in 2013 to review and address Wyoming’s high workplace fatality rate in transportation. The stated mission of the coalition is reducing work-related transportation fatalities through education, training and working relationships with entities charged with overseeing transportation in Wyoming.
Deon Bunker, chair of the coalition, said his organization is active and very concerned about the increase in transportation deaths. Bunker had few clear answers but blamed the spike on a number of factors including the safety of Wyoming’s interstate highways and the presence of foreign truckers on the roads.
“There’s multiple reasons,” he said.
Neither Kindred or state Rep. Landon Brown, R-Cheyenne, chair of the Transportation, Highways and Military Affairs Committee, said they’d even heard of the safety coalition.
“If the Wyoming Transportation Safety Coalition has been tasked with "reducing work-related transportation fatalities" since 2013, we must ask: How effective has this coalition been?” Kindred questioned. “What measurable progress has been made over the past decade? The 11 additional transportation-related deaths this year suggest whatever is being done isn't working.”
Kindred also faults the state Legislature for inaction, which did not consider a single bill this year that would have addressed the issue. The Legislature did however make election integrity bills a high priority, considering more than 40 during this year’s session, and spent an unprecedented amount of time on culture wars issues like transgender people’s access to bathrooms and athletic opportunities.
“When will the governor, the Legislature, DWS, and other responsible agencies move beyond bureaucratic explanations and take decisive action to protect Wyoming's working families? Kindred questioned.
Brown’s committee will study the topic of transportation worker safety this summer.
“It’s affecting people we live right next to,” Brown said. “When traffic is flying by these workers fixing the roads, it’s risking their lives.”
Hope On The Highways
Kevin Hawley, president of the Wyoming Trucking Association and a member of the coalition, plans to lobby the public and private sector to help spark a funding campaign to bring awareness to the dangers of driving on Wyoming roads. The Trucking Association, Hawley said, has none of these resources itself.
“We need to reaffirm our commitment and recognize that we still have a problem,” he said. “We need to take it seriously and need to fight for the resources to enact change.”
Hawley was motivated to start his efforts after reading a Newsweek story that painted a negative picture of driving on Wyoming roads.
“Frankly it pissed me off,” he said.
Recently, Hawley solicited the help of two students at the University of Wyoming to track data on transportation injuries and fatalities in Wyoming. What they found was 90% of the truck-related accidents that occurred on I-80 involved non-Wyoming residents, and 78% occurred during inclement weather conditions.
Combining this with anecdotal reports Hawley received that truckers were being pressured by their bosses to drive in bad Wyoming weather, he believes the real solution to improving road safety is to sink money into a public awareness campaign that could include digital advertising and phone applications.
Energy Industry Concerns
President Donald Trump’s administration has made significant regulatory cuts to oversight and workplace safety organizations since taking office, such as pausing enforcement of a 2024 rule that requires coal-mining companies to protect their workers from exposure to silica dust.
The fine powder generated by pulverizing rock can damage human lungs to the point of needing supplemental oxygen or a lung transplant.
Green River resident Marshall Cummings is a trona miner with United Steel Workers in Green River. Cummings said he frequently sees fellow miners dying from lung cancer shortly after retiring from the trona mines.
“We’re trading our sweat, our hard work, and maybe some sore muscles, for a paycheck,” Cummings said. “We’re not trading our blood and our lives and our respiratory health. Having a job isn’t a death sentence.”
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has traditionally performed health and hazard evaluations at these mines. Cummings was recently sent an email from a former employee of this program informing him that 92% of NIOSH had been cut by Trump, including the entire health inspection program.
Cummings said this isn’t only a scary development for miners but also firefighters.
Although he believes the trona mine he works at is safe, Cummings said the same can’t be said for others. To those who argue that miners who feel unsafe should move to better companies or find a different profession, Cummings said the safety hazards are not always obvious.
He pointed to the example of the Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah, where nine miners died in 2007 as a result of a collapse. The mine owner Genwal Resources was reported to use overly aggressive mining and failed to recalibrate their modeling of Crandall's supposed stability to match the reduction of crucial barrier pillars.
Although Cummings said he supports the Trump administration’s overall goal of lowering regulatory burdens for mines to get permits, he and Kindred don’t believe this should come at the expense of worker safety.
“It’s going to equal more disasters and that’s not what we want,” he said. “If the federal government won’t do it, then the state should.”
What They Want
Kindred and Shanor want to see a renewed dedication to addressing workplace deaths, an issue they believe is not at the top of nearly enough people’s priority lists. Due to the gaps in tracking data, AFL-CIO isn’t even able to identify the families who have lost loved ones at the workplace.
Around three years ago, a local Wyoming chapter of Kids’ Chance of America was created, a nonprofit dedicated to providing educational scholarships to the children of workers killed on the job. They haven’t been successful with their mission so far, unable to identify a single family impacted despite having plenty of money to give out.
“Because we don’t have good data, we don’t have names of workers, and we have not been able to give a scholarship,” Shanor said. “We’re the last state in the country to establish this organization, in a state where we’ve killed the most people, and we can’t get the names of these workers to support their families.”
Cummings said it might be time for more blue-collar workers like himself to get more involved in politics. He’s already thinking about the ramifications of his children becoming a Wyoming worker someday.
“If you don’t feel represented, then maybe it’s time that you become the representative,” Cummings said. “I feel a lot of these workers get motivated to not only write their state legislator but become their state legislator.”
Leo Wolfson can be reached at leo@cowboystatedaily.com.
