Working In the Line of Fire

By Phil La Duke

When someone dies in the workforce through no fault of his or her own it’s undeniably a tragedy.  But in many people’s minds, line of fire injuries—those injuries that result when a worker places his or her body in the direct path of  a serious hazard—the injured worker must bear at least some culpability for his or her injury. It’s especially easy to dismiss a line of fire injury as the worker’s “own damned fault”, but is it?

Before I continue I should disclose something about myself that could bias me on this topic: my grandfather died on the job from a line of fire injury.  In the case of my grandfather, he was driving a tractor (he was a farmer in the 1950’s having left a lucrative career installing conveyor belts—a job that required extensive travel—so that he could spend more time at home with…