Labor Day’s as appropriate a time as any to reflect on deaths in the workplace. Last year, 5,702 people died in U.S. job-related accidents, according to figures compiled and recently released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Of that number, men accounted for 93 percent, or 5,300, of those deaths [1]. That’s an average of more than 14 dead men a day. Women accounted for 7 percent of all work-related deaths last year.

White men paid the heaviest toll, suffering 70 percent of U.S. workplace deaths. Hispanic men accounted for 16 percent of all workplace deaths and African American men, 10 percent. Regardless of race, these men died building and maintaining our roads and utilities, our offices and houses and while at work on ranches and farms that supply our food and on oil rigs and in mines that provide us with energy resources.

Most men who die on the job are in the prime of life, ages 35 to 54. The trend is persistent and deadly: male work-related deaths are up 3 percent from three years ago while female job-related deaths dropped 1 percent.

Unlike military deaths in Iraq, the annual workplace slaughter is little noted. Yet nearly twice as many men died in the U.S. workplace just last year as compared with the number of U.S. soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan in more than three-and-a-half years. Might Leftist politics explain the media’s selective focus on, and concern for, dead men? (Think: Michael "Stupid White Man" Moore.)

The tragic deaths of 12 men in West Virginia's Sago Mine last January was newsworthy. However, initial media accounts of the mining disaster often referred to the dead men as genderless "miners" – an odd twist for a media so otherwise gender-conscious. But when men die in war, they are merely "soldiers;" and when men die in construction accidents, they are merely "workers."

In a related article, "Dying at Work," Carrie Coolidge for Forbes.com [2] reports on workplace fatalities but never mentions that men account for more than 90 percent of annual U.S. workplace deaths. Ms. Coolidge works for a business publication but seems unable to do the math or to discern a statistical omission.

When terrorists attacked the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, the politically correct term "firefighters" applied only to dead firemen. The New York City firefighter death toll on that horrendous day was men 343, women 0. America as a gender-neutral society seems wonderful and long overdue until someone gets hurt.

But it's an old story. Remember the sinking of the Titanic? Among the survivors, 94 percent of first-class passengers and 81 percent of second-class passengers were women. A modern take on the gallant phrase, “Women and children first,” coincided with the release of the movie, Titanic. The joke was: “How long can a feminist hold her breath?”

Ironically, the controversial Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA, is based on making the workplace safer for women. When the multibillion-dollar VAWA was first passed in 1994 under President Bill Clinton, critics pointed out that relatively few women experienced job-related "assaults and violent acts," a category key to vesting VAWA with federal authority under the Commerce Act.

Never mind that only about 2 percent of all assaults and violent acts at that time involved women in the workplace. That figure was the same last year, or 1.98 percent to be exact. (Incidents in this category include "violence by persons, self-inflicted injury and attacks by animals.")

Nonetheless, our federal legislators renewed VAWA late last year, and, in the process, condoned a millennia-old social norm: men are expendable. Imagine if true workplace equality existed and amends for perceived historical injustices were law. Society would then force college-age women to replace the men whose lives were lost in the Sago Mine disaster, a fate suffered by many of our forefathers who also longed to be more than social obligation permitted.

Sadly, some people today hold that men are victims only of other men, not societal injustice. A letter from a woman printed in the Houston Chronicle shortly after the Sago Mine deaths cited a trite feminist excuse: “Men have all the power; therefore, men are to blame for the miners' deaths.” An apparent contradiction escapes her: if men truly had all the power, then women would surely work the coal mines.

The woman's comment reveals feminism’s reckless and reprehensible tendency to encourage primal narcissism. And once having succumbed, those so afflicted are rendered incapable of acknowledging, let alone expressing gratitude, for the millennia of sacrifices made by men on behalf of women.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cftb0211.pdf

[2] http://www.forbes.com/work/2006/01/04/coal-dangerous-jobs-cz_cc_0104dangerousjobs.html