Showing a disregard for the safety of workers can get you in trouble in this country. But unfortunately, not enough trouble.

BP executives and managers have been screwing up for years when it comes to worker safety, and the recent deaths of 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon is only a continuation of a sad history for the company. In 2005, 15 people died and hundreds where injured at a BP refinery blast in Texas.

If a company’s executives or managers are so focused on the bottom line that employees end up maimed or dead because they cut safety corners, the government can come in and fine them.

But the fines for worker deaths are pathetic. Turns out they are more severe if you kill a turtle.

Earlier this month, David Michaels, the administrator of the nation’s top worker safety agency, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), talked about how screwed our the safety net for workers is.

During a speech at the annual conference of the American Society of Safety Engineers, he said:

“Recently a worker died while cleaning a container,” Dr. Michaels said. “I believe the employer was slapped with a $175,000 fine. But what gets me is that the same company was fined $10 million dollars for the same incident for causing pollution and negatively hurting the fish and crabs. So how do we tell the family of this worker who died that fish and crabs are worth more than his life?”

And if an employer is really bad, he continued, and “willfully ignores workplace safety rules and regs and prevention efforts and one of their employees dies on the job” that employer gets six months in jail.

By contrast, he noted, “if you harass a burro on federal land you can get a year in jail. Does that make sense?”

No sir, it doesn’t.

Given the measly fines, you have to wonder how safe the thousands of workers now cleaning up the Gulf are. I recently wrote about that free-for-all for MSNBC.com.

An army of 24,000 temporary workers have swarmed the Gulf Coast to help clean up the mess from the massive BP oil spill. But it is far from clear who is responsible for ensuring the safety and long-term health of those doing the critical and often dangerous grunt work.

Already workers have been injured, some hospitalized.

Workers are covered by a patchwork of federal, state and local agencies and regulations. The government only last week announced how worker safety efforts in the Gulf would be coordinated, more than 50 days after the rig explosion.

Labor and environmental advocates say worker safety in the Gulf is precarious.

What if company managers faced felony charges for willful actions that lead to a worker’s death?

One bill out there would impose such a penalty.

The Protecting America’s Workers Act, introduced by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, called for felony charges for executives and also upped fines when employees are killed.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey, a Democrat from California, is sponsoring the bill to amend the OSHA Act, which has not been updated since the 1970s, and spoke about the legislation at a House hearing in March:

She said:

“Over 5,000 workers a year are still killed on the job. 50,000 die from occupational diseases and millions of others become seriously injured or ill. There are limitations on OSHA’s effectiveness unless Congress makes fundamental changes to the OSHA Act.” She said her bill will address three major weaknesses in the OSHA Act, including expanding safety protections to millions of state and municipal workers that are now not covered by OSHA; make changes to the abysmal whistle blower provisions; and finally, “bring OSHA enforcement into the 21st center by updating civil and criminal penalties.” She said penalties for worker deaths and injuries have not been updated for two decades.

I know we’re all focused on stopping the oil leak in the Gulf right now, but maybe this bill needs some air time on CNN and the rest of the stations offering obsessive coverage of turtles covered in oil.

There will be a collective sigh of relief when the oil finally stops flowing. But will we all forget those 11 men who died?

Maybe we need some t-shirts with pictures of oil workers on them.