The numbers are stunning: Every year over two million workers are seriously injured at work, and over 5,000 workers lose their lives on the job. The press rarely covers these incidents, and when they do the incidents are labeled as “accidents,” implying the injury or death was not preventable, it just happened. Yet, the overwhelming majority of injuries and death on the job are preventable because they are due to unsafe conditions. Had these dangerous conditions been corrected, lives and limbs could have been saved. Despite a federal law passed 55 years ago that requires covered employers to provide safe conditions to prevent serious injuries or death, the statistics are clear that dangerous conditions persist in many workplaces. Why? The answer is simple: Employees have little agency to ensure their workplaces are safe. Let’s fix that.

Workers get seriously hurt working on roofs when they are not provided with safety harnesses and lines, when they get killed in trenches that are not protected from collapsing on those working in them, when they suffer amputations when equipment is not guarded or is allowed to run during repairs, when they hurt their backs because they are required to repeatedly lift or push things that are too heavy, when they slip on floors that remain cluttered and wet, when they get ill from exposure to toxic chemicals and when they get hurt because the proper training on hazards is not provided. Workers are getting hurt at work not only in the industries we often think of as dangerous—saw mills and construction—but in all sectors, including in nursing homes, in hog farming, in psychiatric hospitals, in manufacturing, in meatpacking plants, in delivery services, and in the airline industries.

There can be a huge personal cost to workers from being injured at work. A severe work injury or the death of a family member on the job can throw a family out of the middle class and into poverty. This is especially true for low-wage workers who are often in the most dangerous jobs. Further, because of limited protections, studies confirm that many of these workers who are seriously injured at work pay for their own recovery. Many end up needing charity or going on Social Security Disability—so the worker, charities, and taxpayers, not the employer, pay the cost of the injury or death. While I was working on this article, a neighbor posted that a local charity had been providing care to former garbage men in my county because they hurt their backs lifting and dumping heavy trash cans on trucks with no automatic lifting device. These men lost their jobs from their injury and were homeless.

How does this happen? Workers’ compensation laws passed in every state virtually bar workers from suing their bosses if they get hurt or killed from dangers at work—even in cases of employer negligence (an extremely narrow exception exists for a few cases that can prove an intentional tort). Families of workers killed on the job are also similarly restricted from suing.

This is in sharp contrast to your rights as a customer. Using slippery floors as an example, if a customer enters a store and slips on a wet floor, they have a right to file a lawsuit in cases of negligence. But if you are an employee and slip in the same establishment on a wet floor—you have virtually no right to sue, even when the boss was negligent. Workers are limited to filing a workers compensation claim to ask the employer to pay some part of their medical bills and a small part of any lost wages. In most cases, a worker will need a lawyer to do this and even then it is a steep hill to climb to see any benefits at all.

A survey of 4,387 workers in low-wage jobs found that of those who experienced a serious injury, only 6 percent received any workers compensation benefits. This study also found that when workers reported their injury to their employer, 50 percent experienced discrimination or other illegal reactions by the employer. That is why only 8 percent of the workers surveyed who experienced a serious injury filed a worker’s compensation claim at all. And it’s not just low-wage workers who must pay for their own recovery or rely on taxpayer-funded programs or charity. Studies looking at all jobs where workers are injured found that employers provide only about 20 percent of the cost of a workplace injury or illness through worker’s compensation.

In total, the sheer number of serious injuries and deaths on the job cost the economy over $176 billion. The National Safety council estimates that this figure includes wage and productivity losses of $53.1 billion, medical expenses at $34.8 billion, and administrative expenses of $59.5 billion.

The main federal worker safety law, the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, does require covered employers to prevent injuries and death on the job. Despite it being chronically underfunded and understaffed, it has made a difference over the last 55 years. Work-related deaths and injuries are down 65 percent from the early 1970s with an almost doubling of the workforce. But the law clearly has not done enough to keep workers safe on the job. One glaring reason is the law provides limited rights to workers to protect themselves on the job.

Unlike most other environmental and worker protection laws, the federal worker safety law only allows workers an administrative pathway to try to get employers to correct dangerous conditions. They can only fill out, sign, and file a complaint form that requests a federal inspection and hope for an inspection that finds the employer in violation of the law. But the statistics are not promising—at current staffing levels, the chronically underfunded agency would take over 160 years to inspect every workplace just once. Unlike local health authorities that are staffed to visit restaurants, for example, annually, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) might never inspect an individual workplace. Further, OSHA cannot close down a dangerous workplace. If OSHA does inspect, the agency is allowed to take up to six months to issue any violations and penalties that require the hazard to be corrected. Employers can contest the agency’s findings, which then further postpones their obligation to eliminate the dangers. The slippery floors or other dangers can then persist—with no obligation to fix them. Further, if OSHA doesn’t inspect due to lack of resources, a worker cannot challenge OSHA’s decision or take the employer to court to enforce their safety rights.

Equally troublesome is the lack of protection from employer retaliation or discrimination available to workers who do speak up to their bosses about unsafe conditions or even just report an injury. The protections for workers in the OSHA law from retaliation are among the weakest in all federal legislation. In fact, the OSHA law offers the weakest protection of any statute enacted since 2000. The language is so weak that almost every complaint OSHA receives from workers about retaliation for raising safety concerns is dismissed. And most egregiously, unlike almost every other statute that contains anti-retaliation provisions, the OSHA law does not allow workers to take their case into court. If OSHA fails to investigate their case—workers are out of options.

To protect themselves, workers must be able to speak up and raise concerns about their safety and their lack of protection. Their voices are critical to ensuring that our workplaces are safe. But clearly current federal protections and enforcement are limited and do not provide sufficient protection against retaliation and discrimination against workers who speak up.

Providing workers with the right to go to court if they are retaliated against for raising safety concerns or even reporting an injury is a critical first step for ensuring workers are protected. Given the limited government enforcement capacity, a private right of action is crucial for ensuring meaningful enforcement of a workers’ right to a safe workplace. The outdated language in the 55-year-old OSHA law must be replaced with the language existing in every other statute enacted since 2000 that protects those who speak up.

It is true that many employers provide a safe workplace. But the millions suffering serious injuries and the thousands still killed on the job each year reflect that many bosses still cut corners on safety. There are many ways to increase worker protections to bring down the high number of serious injuries and deaths—doubling OSHA’s budget and number of inspectors, allowing workers to sue to enforce OSHA standards, and increasing OSHA penalties. Providing workers with the ability to just speak up to protect themselves, however, seems like the right first place to start.