“Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped away.”
Dr. Irving Selikoff (1915-1992)

You know, I write this blog every night, and every two weeks Tammy or I put together the Weekly Toll about people killed in the workplace over the past two weeks. And as much as I stress the fact that we're talking about losing fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and children -- not just names, not just statistics, not just three paragraph news articles, it's easy to just write and not feel.

Until occasionally, you get a letter from someone. I got a note tonight from Misty Plante, the wife of Sol Plante, who was killed in a traffic accident last February and listed in the Weekly Toll. She was writing to tell me that Sol's age was wrong; he was 31, not 21.

But what hit me was at the bottom of her e-mail, the Tribute that the family had made for Sol: www.INLOVINGMEMORYOF.NET/SolPlante. Read it and you can't help but cry, and them multiply that by 5700...


Tammy Miser has compiled a whole webpage of tributes and I defy you to get through more than one or two before you have to quit.

These are what our politicians should be reading when deciding on how big OSHA's budget should be, or before they pass legislation to weaken the agency, and these are what Ed Foulke should be reading before his confirmation hearing.