Commercial fishermen die at 28x the national average workplace fatality rate, but fishing vessels face fewer safety inspections than restaurants

Commercial fishing workers are approximately 28 times more likely to die on the job than the average American worker, making it consistently one of the deadliest occupations in the United States according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Falls overboard, vessel disasters, and diving incidents account for the majority of fatalities. Beyond deaths, fishing injuries are massively underreported — even the largest fishing companies in the U.S. routinely fail to comply with regulations requiring reporting of lost-time accidents, making it impossible to compute accurate injury rates for the industry. The regulatory landscape is a jurisdictional mess that leaves fishermen in a gap. OSHA has authority over workplace safety on land, and the Coast Guard has authority over vessel safety at sea, but most commercial fishing vessels are classified as 'uninspected vessels' — meaning they are not subject to the comprehensive safety standards that apply to inspected commercial vessels like cargo ships or ferries. There are far too few regulations relating to fishing vessel safety for uninspected commercial fishing vessels, and the Coast Guard has far too few resources to inspect and enforce even the basic safety regulations that do exist. A restaurant kitchen gets regular health and safety inspections; a fishing vessel where people die at 28x the national rate may go years without one. The human cost is concentrated in specific communities. When a fisherman dies or is permanently disabled, the economic impact cascades through a small town: a family loses its primary income, a boat loses its most experienced crew member, and the community loses institutional knowledge about local fishing grounds, weather patterns, and seamanship that took decades to accumulate. Unlike most industries, commercial fishing has no mandatory workers' compensation in many states, and the Jones Act — which governs maritime injury claims — requires fishermen to prove employer negligence, a higher bar than standard workers' comp. This problem persists because the commercial fishing fleet is fragmented across thousands of small, independent operators who lack the resources to invest in modern safety equipment and training. There is no industry-wide safety culture analogous to what exists in commercial aviation or oil and gas. The Coast Guard's commercial fishing vessel safety program is chronically underfunded relative to the size and geographic spread of the fleet. A 2023 GAO report found that the Coast Guard needed to take additional actions to improve commercial fishing vessel safety efforts. The fundamental structural issue is that fishing is treated as an inherently dangerous occupation where risk is accepted rather than engineered away, and the regulatory framework reflects this fatalistic assumption.