In a bygone era, tragic events birthed social reforms. Then, we got used to them. Now, they're just tragic.

Just over a century ago, a deadly fire swept through a blouse factory in Manhattan, killing 146 garment workers, most of them immigrant women. The Triangle factory owners, who had locked their employees inside for fear of theft, were acquitted of criminal charges, but the disaster led to the first real workplace safety laws, beginning in New York state, and much later, to the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration by President Richard Nixon in 1970.

Last week's massive explosion at the West Fertilizer Company plant in Texas that killed at least a dozen people comes three years after the Upper Big Branch mine explosion in West Virginia that killed 29 and the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 and resulted in the worst oil spill in American history. All three explosions occurred at facilities with negligent safety policies, operating in an era of sporadic inspections by an understaffed regulatory regime. A new, post-Nixon Republican Congress responded to the earlier two disasters by proposing to cut OSHA's budget by 20%.

To his credit, at the time of the latest explosion, President Barack Obama had proposed boosting OSHA's budget by a (very) modest amount – a bit less than 1%. Specifically, Obama would budget more for whistleblowers, less for compliance assistance programs, and the same amount for federal enforcement. This is in line with a general move away from the previous administration's kid gloves approach. Under President George W Bush, inspections and punitive measures were de-emphasized in favor of the Voluntary Protection Program, which credits employers who manage to keep injury and illness rates below their industries' averages. For now, though, such proposals are moot: automatic spending cuts brought on by the sequester have slashed the agency's budget by 8%.

Managing to keep the already low rate of inspections from slipping even lower is what counts as progress at a time when we have only 2,200 OSHA inspectors for the entire country – a workforce plagued, according to a recent report (pdf) by the Government Accountability Office, by poor training and retention rates due to budget cuts.

According to one estimate, OSHA would be expected to get around to inspecting a plant such as West's once every 129 years. In fact, OSHA last inspected the plant in 1985. Other agencies have a mixed record: the Department of Transportation's Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration had recently fined West Fertilizer $10,000 for hazardous ammonia transport and labeling, while the Environmental Protection Agency simply asked the company in a self-assessment whether they thought their plant posed a risk of explosion; unsurprisingly, the company said no.

Even a modest growth in inspector rolls would be insufficient to make up for the growth in the workforce since OSHA's founding. Thus, instead of inspectors, we get whistleblowers: a promise from the government that we may not be able to check conditions ourselves, but if you bother to tell us, we'll be very grateful. The reliance on self-reporting following the de-funding of government enforcement is just one more part of a cycle that began in this country with the collapse of collective bargaining, an institution that at one point created workplace safety committees, which took the place of both expansive state regulation and whistleblowing as a means of securing safe places to work.

It's no coincidence that many of the worst such incidents occur in states affected by both austerity cuts and low or declining union membership. Texas, a proud "right-to-work state", led the nation in fatal workplace accidents in 2011, the last year data are available, with 433 – more than twice the number of fatalities in the next largest state, New York, and nearly 50% more than California (despite having just two-thirds of California's workforce).

To be fair to Texas, workplace accidents can happen anywhere and at any time. But that's precisely the point. Republicans and shady employers don't like unions, federal regulation, or whistleblowers. They presumably don't like massive deadly explosions, either. But they cling to the fantasy that they can have none of the above.