We made workplace safety a priority once. We can again.

Fifty-plus years and OSHA still has fewer inspectors than it did when Nixon signed the thing into law. That's not a talking point, that's just the staffing chart. Meanwhile the economy has moved on to gig work, subcontracted warehouse crews, app-dispatched delivery drivers, all the arrangements that make it genuinely unclear who's legally responsible when someone gets hurt. The law was built for a factory floor with one employer and one address. A lot of American work doesn't look like that anymore.

We're not interested in the version of this story where the answer is simply "more regulation, more agency, more Washington." That's the reflex, and it usually produces rules that punish a small manufacturer in Ohio while the actual hazard, some fly-by-night contractor cutting corners on scaffolding, skates by because nobody's ever set foot in the building. What actually protects workers is enforcement that shows up, penalties that sting the companies gaming the subcontracting shell game, and standards that get updated instead of sitting frozen since the Carter administration.

There's also a market piece here nobody wants to say out loud: safety is cheaper than the alternative, and companies that treat it as overhead instead of insurance are making a bad bet. Workers' comp claims, lawsuits, turnover, all of it costs more than guardrails and training. Business ought to be selling this to itself as a competitiveness issue, not waiting for a government mandate to force the math.

This isn't nostalgia for big union power or big federal power either one. It's a plain observation that a country that can put satellites in orbit ought to be able to keep a warehouse worker from getting crushed by a forklift because nobody updated a safety standard in forty years. Fix the inspection numbers and update the rules for how people actually work now. That's not radical. That's just doing the job.