My brother was killed at work. The fine was $450. Eighteen years later, Washington still treats workplace deaths this way — because the legislature keeps choosing to.
Washington tells itself it's a worker-friendly state. Paid family leave. A $16 minimum wage. The strongest union density on the West Coast. On policy paper, we are not Texas.
Cross from labor standards into labor enforcement, and the brand collapses. The average L&I penalty for a serious workplace-safety violation in Washington is roughly $2,000 — lower than 42 other states. When employers appeal, more than a third of those fines get reduced; about $15 million in safety fines were voided this way between 2017 and 2021 alone. The result is a deterrence system that, in operation, prices a worker's life as a line item cheaper than the safety equipment that would have saved them.
Progressive packaging. A corporate-protection product underneath.
On March 14, 2008, my brother Paul Roald Pedersen, 35, was killed at West Coast Fabricators in Arlington. He was repairing a forklift. The manufacturer's manual required the forks be secured with a chain during repair. There was no chain. When coworkers found him they tried to lift the machine off his body with a bottle jack. His cause of death was mechanical asphyxiation.
L&I investigated. They confirmed the company had violated the procedure. The penalty for killing my brother through documented negligence was $450.
Paul was unmarried and had no children. Under Washington's workers' compensation framework, that meant the death benefit collapsed to a single line item: funeral expenses. No survivor benefit. No pension. A check toward a casket and the file closed.
The law's premise is that an unmarried, childless worker leaves no one behind to be compensated. That premise is wrong on the facts and obsolete by decades.
The share of working-age Washingtonians who are unmarried has grown every decade since the statute was written. A meaningful percentage of the state's workforce now falls into the category whose negligent workplace death the law treats as a $7,000 transactional event. The state isn't telling those workers their lives matter less. It's telling their employers — in the only language employers measure decisions in — that their lives cost less. That is, on the margin, a procurement signal.
I built this page in 2008 because I assumed surely, given how exposed the gaps were, the system would tighten. It hasn't. Three numbers:
The 2025 legislative session passed inspection-notification updates and tightened workplace-violence rules in healthcare settings. Useful work. Neither touches the two structural problems Paul's death exposed: fatality fines that don't deter, and a death-benefit framework that treats a single worker as a casket and a closed file.
L&I administers Washington's workplace-safety laws inside the boundaries the legislature draws. Every reform on this page requires the legislature to act. There is no other route. There is no agency rule-making path around them. There is no federal preemption to wait for. The only thing that moves this is constituent pressure on the people in Olympia.
Each Washington resident has one state senator and two state representatives. They are reachable by email in under five minutes.
Three letters land on three desks. Multiply that by readers who write them. That's how this becomes a bill. That's the only mechanism that does.
This page exists because my brother died at work and the state that was supposed to protect him sent the family a check for his funeral and walked away. I was in my twenties when I built it; I'm middle-aged now. The page is older than some of the workers it's trying to protect.
Eighteen years is a long time to be wrong about a state's willingness to fix something this exposed. I keep this page up because I still expect to be right eventually, and because every year more Washingtonians fall into the legal category that says their lives, in the place they spend most of their waking hours, aren't worth more than a burial.
If you have ten minutes, three legislators, and an email address, please write them.
— David Pedersen
info@paulpedersen.org