Working at a frenzied pace out of a modest Loop office, Joseph Kinney relentlessly links facts with faces. The facts document America’s preventable carnage from unsafe workplaces. The faces are reminders that behind each statistic is an individual.
Out of about nine million American workers injured annually on the job, 70,000 are permanently disabled. A worker is more likely to be seriously injured on the job (losing at least a day’s work) during his or her career than a two-pack-a-day smoker is to contract cancer. But there are no surgeon general’s warnings posted above the factory, office, or laboratory door.
In 1975 OSHA began research on defining rules for work in confined spaces. Although standards were finally proposed in late 1989, they have still not been officially promulgated, 16 years and many hundreds of deaths after the rule-making process began.
Joseph Kinney, who at that time worked as a livestock consultant and agribusiness investment banker, arrived at the hospital with his parents. As a Marine in Vietnam, where he’d been seriously injured 17 years earlier, Joe was a hero to his younger brother. Entering the Denver hospital, Joe flashed back to Vietnam: “I was in my Marine Corps noncommissioned officer mode,” he says, “asking, ‘Who did what? Who was responsible for what?’”
“I was interested in some social justice,” Kinney said recently. “It seemed like a reckless homicide. The more I went on, the madder I would get. I just saw lots of inertia and paralysis.” When he walked out of the Washington, D.C., office of the undersecretary of labor for OSHA, after a thoroughly unsatisfying meeting, Kinney turned and said spontaneously that he figured he would be spending about 30 hours a week on the issue of workplace safety for the next ten years.
Kinney earned his anti-Washington sentiments the hard way: he worked there for several years, and before that he suffered in Vietnam from ill-conceived strategies concocted there. After graduating from high school in Wichita, where he was born in 1949, he decided to enter the military, against the wishes of his parents (his father was a teacher, his mother a medical secretary). He chose the Marines, figuring that as long as he was enlisting it might as well be in the most gung-ho branch of all.
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Soon after he arrived in Vietnam he began to entertain doubts about the war’s purported ends. “The first time I saw a tank in Vietnam, it was doing target practice on a Buddhist shrine,” he says. “We were guests of all these people our drill instructors called ‘gooks.’ We’d go to some ‘friendly’ village, and we might hand out C-rations. Two weeks later we’re back in the same village and it’s a free-fire zone–shoot anything that moves. After a while, that gets kind of confusing.”
