Based on the types of common injuries for the line workers, this is a good thing for their health in the long run. From the article, repetitive stress injuries are the norm, not the exception.
If health and safety precautions are cost effective, which I believe they are, then OSHA is redundant because businesses will strive to be economically efficient regardless of the regulations.
Modern mass production (iirc 1900s and later) where each person basically hyperspecializes in one job on an assembly line tends to cause repetitive strain injuries as people are doing the same handful of movements quickly thousands of times a shift. A good factory will shift people around to different parts of the assembly line to try and delay injuries as those will cause more efficiency loss than the hit you get from moving someone from one position on the line to another (sometimes it's even just as small as just having them be on the other side of the conveyor doing the same job).
That sounds like the correct framing. If you think about physical dangers, these are "well understood and handled". It's not just a question of accurate danger assessment, there's also the assumption that the safety equipment provided is sufficient, that the exposure levels are within tolerance, etc. It's just that instead of dosemeters and hazmat suits, it's, say, minutes of content and job-provided therapists.
From personal experience, health and safety officers prefer workers to walk around facilities. Accidents while rare can result in hospitalisation (broken bones) when using skates, scooters and bicycles.
I was once in a datacenter that had a golf cart to get from one end to another (yes - it was that long).
Because if you invert it, it's "the average employee suffers some injury every 21 years. That injury might be a papercut or a twisted ankle or a missing arm.
OSHA tracks this and is a much more reliable source than a random article.
> employers need to be forced by law to maintain safe working conditions for their employees.
Probably less true in trucking, where the leading cause of worker injury is road accidents. If, say, a roofer falls off a roof, the only damage is to the worker, but if a trucker crashes badly enough to get injured, the truck and cargo are likely damaged as well. Truckers and their employees should be more naturally aligned on safety issues.
The reason I consider it ironic in this context is that a number of people have claimed trade work is dangerous, yet the worst injury I've sustained during my career was when I wrote software for a living.
The worst case injuries are certainly worse - a switch room explosion which kills you and your colleagues on the spot is worse than RSI - but as you say we're trained to minimize those risks and most people will work their entire careers without major injury
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