By Steve Wishnia

The 12 most unsafe employers in the U.S. encompass corporate behemoths like Walmart and Tyson Foods; tech titans Uber, Lyft, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX; and a Wisconsin lumber mill that hired a 14-year-old to run power saws, according to the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health.

The group’s criteria for its annual “Dirty Dozen” list include failure to eliminate “known and preventable hazards,” their severity, the employers’ size and prominence, and drawing attention to workers’ campaigns for better conditions, National COSH co-executive director Jessica E. Martinez told an online press conference announcing the list April 25,.

Uber and Lyft made the list because more than 60 drivers for the two app-based taxi companies have been murdered on the job since 2017, according to a Gig Workers Rising report from 2023. An internal Uber document obtained in 2022 by a driver suing the company said that 24,000 drivers had reported “alleged assaults and threats of assault” between 2017 and 2020.

Chicago Lyft driver J.C. Muhammad said that when he tried to report being attacked by a passenger he’d caught trying to hack into the cash app on his phone—the man refused to get out, and then “hit me on the back of the head” with an object and threw bricks at the car—he could only reach an automated number. The company later told him they’d be sure not to match him with the same passenger again.

Muhammad said he feared being deactivated if he’d gotten into more of a confrontation, as he’d already been deactivated by Uber. Lyft has no protocols for drivers to report assaults to police, he added, and police say it’s hard to get details from app companies when drivers file complaints. A recent “disturbing trend,” he said, is of drivers getting fares to locations where a group of people are waiting to rob them.

Those passengers, he said, often book trips with false profiles, burner phones, and anonymous debit cards, so app companies need to develop procedures to identify them enough for drivers to file a viable complaint with police.

The Southern 24-hour restaurant chain Waffle House also made the list for workplace violence. In November 2022, a cook was shot to death outside a restaurant in Atlanta’s DeKalb County suburbs by customers angry that other workers hadn’t let them in because it was closed. There have been two shootings at other Waffle Houses in the Atlanta area in the past four months.

“I do not feel safe on the job,” Cindy Smith, a Waffle House server in DeKalb County for almost 30 years, told the press conference. She recalled being robbed at gunpoint 12 years ago, fearing that she would be shot in the head if she was too slow to open the cash register. Last week, she said, an enraged customer hit a server with a ketchup dispenser during the worker’s third shift.

Smith is a member of the two-year-old Union of Southern Service Workers, which is demanding Waffle House provide 24-hour security. “There is no reason why they can’t,” she said. “They are a multibillion-dollar corporation.”

The New York City company on the list is Valor Security and Investigations, which was indicted in February on charges of selling about 20,000 phony safety certificates to people who had not completed the 40-hour training the city has required for construction workers since 2017. The company’s president, three employees, and a broker were also charged with reckless endangerment in the death of Ivan Frias, who was allegedly working with one of the bogus certificates when he was killed in a 15-story fall in 2022. 

Costa Farms, a Florida ornamental-plants grower, lobbied against proposed Miami rest, shade, and water requirements for outdoor workers last year—two years after a worker there died of heat exhaustion. That measure was quashed in April, when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill prohibiting local governments from enacting heat-safety rules.

Two meatpackers made the list. Tyson Foods, where six workers were fatally injured between 2019 and 2022, accounts for more than half the industry’s injuries from ammonia leaks reported to the Environmental Protection Agency. At Mar-Jac Poultry in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, two workers have been killed by being pulled into machinery in the past three years, including a 16-year-old Guatemalan immigrant hired through the Onin Staffing agency.

Another 16-year old killed by machinery last year was at the Florence Hardwoods lumber mill in northern Wisconsin. A Department of Labor investigation found that the company had hired nine teenagers, ages 14 to 17, to operate machinery such as chop saws and rip saws, which is illegal under federal law.

SpaceX and the Boring Company failed to report hundreds of injuries over the past decade at their rocket-manufacturing plants, including amputations and an explosion that fractured a worker’s skull and put him into a coma. Workers told Reuters last year that multibillionaire owner Elon Musk likes to play with a flamethrower and, because he doesn’t like bright colors, has ordered safety-yellow equipment repainted, and managers tell them not to wear yellow safety gear when he’s around.

The others on the list were Walmart, where a worker in North Little Rock, Arkansas died of a heart attack on a bathroom floor in 2022. Her family said she’d been feeling ill, but was pressured to keep working. The Alabama Department of Corrections made the list for paying prisoners sent to work at outside jobs $2 a day. 

Ascension, the nation’s largest Catholic health-care system, was named for a decade of staffing cuts and for sexual assaults on three patients at its Wichita, Kansas hospital last June. Black Iron Reinforcing/XL Concrete, a Las Vegas rebar company, made the list for threatening to deport workers who reported accidents, and for refusing to accept that workers had voted to join the Iron Workers union in 2022.

The National Labor Relations Board finally certified the union’s victory on April 18, one of several recent victories cited by National COSH. Nurses at Ascension’s Seton Medical Center in Austin, Texas ratified their first union contract in early March, which set safe-staffing minimums.

And on March 26, Phoenix, the hottest large city in the country, enacted heat-protection regulations covering outdoor workers at city contractors, including those who deliver food to planes on the broiling airport tarmac.