Katelyn Parady, Associate Director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, joined the America's Work Force Union Podcast for a wide-ranging conversation on the most pressing threats to worker safety in the United States.
She described a moment she called “pretty heavy,” with Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) penalties down, OSHA inspections down and budget cuts hitting the parts of the agency that protect workers in the highest-hazard, lowest-wage industries. She addressed the extreme heat crisis and the creative organizing happening at the municipal, state and supply chain level to fill the gap left by the absence of a federal heat standard. She also described racial and national origin disparities in workplace death from heat that she called profound and wrong.
Parady detailed a growing epidemic of accelerated silicosis among young countertop fabrication workers, mostly Latino immigrant men in their 20s and 30s, caused by engineered stone products with silica levels that overwhelm standard safety systems, with National COSH preparing to call for a national ban on the product.
Katelyn Parady grew up in Rock Springs, Wyo., a mining and oil-and-gas town in the southern part of the state. Her father was a health and safety manager at a non-union mine. Her mother's best friend was injured in a serious mine accident in the 1980s, surviving but carrying lifelong consequences. Health and safety, she said, was in her blood from the beginning. She found her way to the COSH movement while supporting immigrant worker centers in New England through an organization called Justice at Work. She has been part of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health ever since.
Parady began by summarizing the state of worker safety in the U.S. right now. OSHA penalties are down. Inspections are down. Budget cuts are hitting the portions of the agency that have historically provided the most protection to workers in the most dangerous, lowest-paying jobs. Immigrant workers are operating in a climate of fear that makes raising safety concerns on the job an act of courage many cannot afford to take. And new threats are emerging that the regulatory system was not built to handle, including algorithmic surveillance and AI-driven productivity systems that are extracting maximum output from workers at the direct cost of their physical health.
She also highlighted what she described as a disease the country should not be seeing in this day and age: accelerated silicosis among young countertop fabrication workers in their 20s and 30s. These workers are developing severe, advanced lung disease at ages when their peers are just building careers. Some have needed double lung transplants. Some have died. The cause is engineered stone, a product so high in crystalline silica that it overwhelms even robust safety systems, Parady said.
Meanwhile, some basic safety requirements are under attack again, including proposed rollbacks to lighting requirements on construction sites, she said. Efforts to erode OSHA's general duty clause, the provision that requires employers to address serious recognized hazards even when no specific standard covers them, are also being challenged.
Parady joined the conversation from Phoenix, where she works on extreme heat issues. The numbers she cited on racial disparities in heat death on the job are stark. Studies show that Mexican-born construction workers in the United States face a 91 percent higher risk of dying from heat on the job than the average of all other construction workers combined. US-born Black workers face a 51 percent higher risk of dying from heat on the job than all peers combined. These are not small differences. They reflect a pattern in which the most dangerous work in extreme conditions falls disproportionately on the workers with the least power to refuse it or demand protection.
National COSH's Fired Up Workers for Heat Justice campaign continues to push for a comprehensive federal standard covering all workers, indoor and outdoor, from extreme heat. In the meantime, workers are not waiting. Parady highlighted municipal-level wins, including work by NYCOSH and the Temp Coalition in New York City, where the mayor issued initial guidelines for outdoor workers under city contracts. Airport workers have led campaigns for city-level heat protections in several municipalities. In Florida, workers in the plant nursery industry launched a campaign called Planting Justice targeting big-box retailers, including Home Depot, Costco and Trader Joe's, that sell the plants they grow. The goal is a worker code of conduct across those supply chains that would include heat protections and address other hazards, including pesticide exposure and wage theft.
However, Texas and Florida have both passed laws specifically preventing municipalities from establishing local heat standards, Parady said, effectively using the mechanism of a statewide standard not to create protections but to block them. That has not stopped the fight, but has redirected it, she said. Workers who had victories within reach, including an effort to protect more than 100,000 outdoor workers in Miami-Dade County, have had those wins taken away by state legislatures. The response has been to find new leverage points and keep organizing.
The second major issue Parady discussed is one National COSH is preparing to take on at the national level. Accelerated silicosis among countertop fabrication workers is the direct result of workers cutting, grinding and polishing engineered stone products whose crystalline silica content is so high that standard industrial hygiene controls cannot adequately protect workers from the dust they generate.
The workers most affected are predominantly young Latino immigrant men, many in their 20s and 30s, working in small fabrication shops across the country. California has identified several hundred cases, largely because the state has an occupational health surveillance system capable of tracking them. Elsewhere, Parady said, public health infrastructure for identifying these cases simply does not exist yet, meaning the true scope of the epidemic is likely significantly larger than reported numbers suggest.
Australia has banned engineered stone entirely. California's Cal/OSHA is currently proposing what would amount to a de facto ban on work with the product in that state. Parady said National COSH is preparing to call for a national ban on the product, noting that safe alternative countertop materials exist and that the root problem is not inadequate safety precautions but the product itself.
The manufacturer at the center of the issue is Cambria, the only domestic producer of engineered stone and a 2026 National COSH Dirty Dozen honoree. Parady said Cambria has been actively lobbying for legislation that would protect it from third-party lawsuits and has pushed responsibility for worker safety down the supply chain to the small fabrication shops whose workers are getting sick and dying. She described Cambria's resistance to changing or withdrawing the product as rooted in vertical integration: the company owns a silica mine in Canada, meaning a move away from engineered stone would directly threaten the profitability of its entire operation.
She said she believes public awareness could be a powerful lever, noting that most consumers who learned their countertops were connected to a young father in his 30s needing a double-lung transplant would not want to be part of that. An effort to reach the interior design community, which routinely recommends quartz countertops, could be a significant part of any national campaign on this issue.
More information on National COSH and the Dirty Dozen report is available at nationalcosh.org.
Every victory at the bargaining table starts with workers standing together. From the shop floor to the statehouse, hear how activists are fighting for better wages, safer conditions and a stronger future. Subscribe to the America's Work Force Union Podcast to get the latest interviews with the leaders and organizers building worker power across America.