Last week, a confluence of events reminded the U.S. public that it’s not just the food we eat that’s increasingly dangerous in our daily lives—inadequate safety on the job still is killing America’s working people.

The week ended with two more deaths from construction cranes, this time in Illinois. These fatalities came within days of four deaths due to a crane collapse in Houston—and raises to 18 the number of workers who died from crane-related deaths so far this year, according to an estimate by The Wall Street Journal, which doesn’t include bystander deaths.

Every day, most of us go to work and then come home. Next day: Rinse, repeat.

But some U.S. workers go to work and never come home.

In April 2005, Donald Wilcher Smith was one of them. The 22-year-old central Texas man was electrocuted at the Sanderson Farms processing plant.

This week, his father, Donald Coit Smith, described what it’s like to lose his son.

I do not possess the capacity to adequately describe the horror that possesses my soul from my son’s death.

There are many reasons economic immigrants come to this nation—driven out of their home countries by bad trade deals that fail to consider the impact on workers or because they are fleeing unfettered corporate greed that seeks out impoverished nations to pay the lowest possible wages. Last week in this spot, I took a look at why border crossings start in the boardroom.

Once in the United States, immigrants are ripe for employer exploitation—and many U.S. employers don’t hesitate to do so.