According to OSHA, a federal worker safety agency, the 54-year-old male maintenance employee was working to locate and repair a roof leak at Salvation Army’s donation center on West Colonial Drive on the morning of Nov. 7, 2024, when he fell from the roof through a skylight. The man suffered fatal head trauma after landing onto the facility’s concrete floor.
The federal agency, tasked with investigating workplace fatalities, later identified five violations of workplace health and safety regulations at the Orlando donation center. An OSHA news release listed a failure by the nonprofit to assess workplace hazards and a failure to provide fall protection training to employees, among others. The nonprofit, facing $120,817 in penalties total, also failed to report the workplace death to OSHA within the mandatory eight-hour window, and lacked a hazard communication program.
Salvation Army told Orlando Weekly in a statement (roughly 24 hours after initial publication of this story) that the organization “is saddened” by the death of one of their former employees. “Our heartfelt thoughts and prayers remain with the individual’s family, friends, and colleagues,” a spokesperson shared. “The safety and well-being of our employees is of utmost importance to The Salvation Army. We are actively implementing all measures required by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).”
Florida does not have a state workplace safety agency of its own — former Gov. Jeb Bush abolished that roughly 25 years ago — so the state’s workforce of 11.2 million relies upon only federal agency OSHA, an agency suffering from nearly record-low staffing levels, to enforce workplace safety rules and cite companies for safety violations. According to an annual report from the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of labor unions, OSHA staffs just one workplace inspector for every 84,937 workers in the United States.
The agency suffered a significant decline in inspectors during the first Trump administration, and the latest House-approved budget proposal would cut federal OSHA’s enforcement staffing by 13 percent, according to an analysis by former OSHA official Jordan Barab. Current OSHA staffing levels, based on the latest data compiled by the AFL-CIO, leave the agency with just enough staff to inspect U.S. workplaces once every 185 years.
“Workers fought and died for generations for the health and safety laws and protections we have today, and this year’s report shows we need to do even more. The Trump administration and DOGE are gutting the federal agencies that hold bosses accountable for endangering workers, firing the federal workers who monitor and research health hazards, indicating that they will repeal crucial worker safety regulations, and giving billionaires like Elon Musk the power to access and even manipulate OSHA whistleblower records,” said AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler in an April news release.
“We can’t bring back the thousands of workers lost each year, but we can fight to prevent more devastation to working families across this country and demand that the Trump administration reverse course.”
Falls are one of the leading causes of workplace deaths, according to OSHA data, followed by transportation accidents. There were 5,283 total workplace fatalities recorded in the U.S. in 2023, the latest year for which comprehensive fatality data is available.
Salvation Army, a nonprofit that serves about 30 million Americans annually, is a repeat offender and has been cited by the federal government before for violating workplace safety requirements and unlawfully discriminating against a worker in Ann Arbor, Michigan, allegedly due to his disability.
This post has been updated to add a short statement from Salvation Army.
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This article appears in Summer Guide 2025.