Both cancer and heart disease are modern afflictions normally traceable, directly or indirectly, to work. The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing - or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for.
Work is, if anything, more dangerous in the state-socialist countries than it is here.
Thousands of Russian workers were killed or injured building the Moscow subway. On the other hand, deregulation, currently fashionable, won't help and will probably hurt. From a health and safety standpoint, among others, work was at its worst in the days when the economy most closely approximated laissez-faire. No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats seems to make much difference at the point of production. Serious enforcement of even the rather vague standards enforceable in theory by OSHA would probably bring the economy to a standstill.