Didion Milling Inc. of Cambria, Wisconsin experienced a corn mill explosion in 2017 that cost five employees their lives and wounded several others. Just last week, the owners of Didion were found guilty of forged certificates of compliance with the Clean Air Act and for hindering the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in its investigation of the explosion.
Officials in the company had also violated OSHA’s requirement for grain milling factories to develop programs to control the levels of combustible grain dust. Additionally, they refused to purchase and install the preventative equipment required by OSHA, finding it cheaper to pay the fines, instead. It was this negligence toward worker safety and explosion prevention that cost several Didion employees their livelihoods in 2017.
This is not an isolated event of employers’ negligence to ensure workplace safety. In 2023 alone, Wisconsin lost the lives of a 16-year-old sawmill worker in Florence County and an 8-year-old Nicaraguan immigrant working in a dairy farm in Dane County.
The Florence County incident was a result of the company’s illegal employment of children under 18 in the sawmill’s hazardous working conditions. Republican legislators may be partially responsible for the recent increase in the employment of minors. With worker shortages earlier this year, Republican lawmakers worked to roll back labor laws that regulated the employment of minors, causing concerns among child welfare advocates. For instance, Wisconsin legislators planned on reducing the age requirement for serving alcohol to just 14-years old after legalizing children working until 11 p.m. Allowing minors to work in dangerous conditions and long hours clearly has detrimental effects and cannot be our solution to labor shortages.
Immigrant workers are also victims of Wisconsin’s negligence towards labor safety. According to the Wisconsin Examiner, labor trafficking of immigrant workers — both adults and minors — has resulted in economic exploitation and physical abuse in the workplace.
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Wisconsin’s dairy farms utilize illegal immigrant labor and are a prominent site of immigrant abuse. Mexican immigrant and victim of labor trafficking in Wisconsin Miguel Antonio Lopez said his employer confiscated his passport, demanded increased output from employees without wage increase, revoked their ability to take breaks — even for water — and verbally and psychologically abused them.
Even worse, the Examiner reports most of the immigrant workers on Wisconsin’s dairy farms are undocumented, meaning they are dependent upon these illegal jobs for their survival. They fear any interaction with law enforcement due to their undocumented status, ultimately trapping them in these inhumane conditions.
What can Wisconsin do to prevent the abuse and death of these vulnerable employee populations? At the very minimum, proposals to loosen child labor laws cannot be considered if we are even slightly concerned about the safety of our minors. Additionally, law enforcement must increase regulation of employment sites to prevent negligence from employers.
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A ProPublica article said the lack of bilingual officers increases barriers between immigrant dairy workers and law enforcement. Additionally, OSHA does not seem to adequately investigate deaths or regulate unsafe conditions on dairy farms due to their small size. Law enforcement’s blind eye towards this vulnerable labor source is simply unacceptable.
We cannot wait until another factory explosion occurs or another child’s life is lost before demanding action from our government officials.
Aanika Parikh ([email protected]) is a sophomore studying molecular and cell biology.
