08/23/2026
West Virginia Is One of America's Deadliest States for Workers. Why Does Our Legislature Keep Taking Away Workers' Rights?
A new study provides another disturbing reminder of something West Virginia workers and their families have known for generations: going to work in West Virginia can be dangerous.
According to a study reported by WTAP, West Virginia ranks as the seventh-deadliest state in the country for workers, with 5.54 fatal workplace injuries per 100,000 people. The study analyzed the latest fatal occupational injury data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That should concern every West Virginian.
It should particularly concern the members of the West Virginia Legislature.
Unfortunately, for years our Legislature has moved in the opposite direction. Rather than strengthening accountability when corporations unnecessarily expose West Virginians to dangerous conditions, lawmakers have repeatedly passed legislation under the politically appealing label of “tort reform.”
In our view, much of what is called tort reform is something considerably simpler: taking rights away from injured citizens and giving greater legal protection to corporations and insurance companies.
There Is Nothing Conservative About Eliminating Personal Responsibility
We constantly hear about personal responsibility.
Workers are expected to follow the rules. Drivers are expected to operate their vehicles safely. Property owners are expected to maintain their property. Ordinary West Virginians are expected to accept responsibility when their conduct harms somebody else.
Why should a corporation be different?
The civil justice system is built around a basic principle: If your wrongful conduct seriously injures another person, you should be responsible for the harm you caused.
That principle shouldn't disappear merely because the responsible party happens to be a large corporation with an insurance company behind it.
Yet every time the Legislature creates another immunity, damages limitation or procedural obstacle to holding a wrongdoer accountable, it shifts some of the consequences of dangerous conduct away from the company that created the danger and onto the injured worker and his or her family.
We believe that is bad public policy.
West Virginia Workers Already Face Significant Restrictions
West Virginia employers that maintain workers' compensation coverage generally receive broad immunity from ordinary civil lawsuits brought by their employees for workplace injuries.
There is an important but deliberately narrow exception under West Virginia law when an employer acts with what the Legislature has defined as “deliberate intention.” These cases are commonly known as deliberate-intent cases.
The requirements are demanding.
An injured worker does not win a deliberate-intent case simply by proving that an employer was negligent. The worker must satisfy the particular requirements established by West Virginia law for overcoming the employer's workers' compensation immunity.
The Legislature has repeatedly narrowed and defined those requirements.
And in 2023, the Legislature went further by imposing a statutory limitation on noneconomic damages in actions brought under this portion of the Workers' Compensation Act. The statute generally limits noneconomic damages to the greater of twice the worker's economic damages or $500,000 per person, subject to a statutory inflation adjustment.
Think about what “noneconomic damages” can mean in the real world.
They can represent the human consequences of catastrophic burns. An amputation. Paralysis. Disfigurement. Chronic pain. Loss of the ability to enjoy life. Or the consequences to a family when a worker goes to work one morning and never comes home.
Those losses are very real even though they do not arrive with an invoice attached to them.
Accountability Makes Workplaces Safer
There is a larger issue here that often gets lost in debates about tort reform.
Accountability changes behavior.
Businesses respond to economic incentives just like individuals do.
When corporations know that ignoring a serious safety hazard can expose them to meaningful financial consequences, they have another powerful reason to identify hazards, train employees, enforce safety rules, provide appropriate equipment and correct dangerous conditions before someone gets hurt.
The reverse is also true.
The more government insulates a company from the financial consequences of its conduct, the less economic incentive that company has to prevent the conduct in the first place.
That doesn't mean every workplace accident is somebody's fault. It isn't.
It doesn't mean every injured worker should have a lawsuit. They shouldn't.
But when the evidence establishes that a company knew about a serious workplace hazard and nevertheless exposed its workers to that danger, our response should not be to ask how we can further protect the company from a jury.
We should be asking how the accident could have been prevented.
Tort Law Is About More Than Compensation
Civil lawsuits serve several purposes.
Compensating injured people is certainly one of them. But the civil justice system also provides something that governmental regulation alone cannot always provide: accountability through discovery and a public courtroom.
A lawsuit can require a company to produce internal emails, safety audits, incident reports, photographs, training records, policies, prior complaints and communications that may reveal what management knew before somebody was seriously injured or killed.
Witnesses can be questioned under oath.
Corporate representatives can be required to explain company decisions.
Experts can evaluate whether accepted safety standards were followed.
And ultimately, citizens sitting on a jury can decide whether the company should be held responsible.
That is not a defect in our legal system.
It is one of its protections.
Who Benefits When We Take Away a Citizen's Right to Recover Damages?
Whenever another “tort reform” proposal is introduced in Charleston, West Virginians should ask a simple question:
Who benefits from this law?
If a law limits what a catastrophically injured person can recover, the injured person doesn't benefit.
His family doesn't benefit.
If an insurance company would otherwise have been obligated to pay the claim, however, the insurance company certainly may benefit.
And if legislation makes it more difficult to hold a corporation responsible for unsafe conduct, the corporation benefits.
Calling legislation “tort reform” does not change who gains and who loses from it.
West Virginia Should Be Protecting Its Workers
The latest workplace fatality numbers should cause our elected officials to reconsider the direction in which West Virginia has been moving.
A state ranking among the seven deadliest states for American workers should not be looking for additional ways to insulate unsafe conduct from meaningful accountability.
It should be asking why so many West Virginians are dying at work and what can be done to prevent the next death.
West Virginia has a proud history of people performing difficult and dangerous jobs—in mines, factories, chemical plants, construction sites, utility operations, trucking, timber operations and countless other industries.
Those workers deserve more than speeches about how important they are.
They deserve safe workplaces.
And when companies knowingly disregard serious hazards and workers are catastrophically injured or killed as a result, those workers and their families deserve access to our courts.
We Represent West Virginia Workers and Their Families
Our law firm represents people who have suffered catastrophic workplace injuries and families who have lost loved ones in workplace and industrial accidents.
We have seen firsthand what these cases mean to families.
They are not statistics.
They are people whose lives can be permanently changed because someone failed to address a dangerous condition before tragedy occurred.
We believe corporations should be held to the same basic standard we expect of every West Virginian: Take responsibility for your actions.
And we believe West Virginians should be extremely skeptical whenever politicians tell them that taking away their legal rights is somehow “reform.”
If you or a family member has suffered a catastrophic workplace injury or death, an experienced attorney should investigate not merely what happened, but why it happened, who knew about the danger, what should have been done to prevent it, and whether others had encountered the same hazard before.
We also encourage anyone considering our firm to investigate us. Read what our former clients have said about their experiences with our lawyers on our website, Google and other independent online review platforms.
Our clients can describe how we handled their cases better than any advertisement ever could.
New study finds West Virginia among the deadliest states for workers
