When it comes to incidents in the workplace, we have good news and bad news, though this news is not new as I have blogged about this before a while ago.
The good news is, the numbers of workplace incidents have fallen dramatically over the last 100 years, and especially in the last 40 years or so as safety has become a cultural priority in many workplaces and in government regulatory agencies.
About 100 years ago, with a smaller workforce, there were an estimated 20,000 work-related deaths stemming from workplace incidents. Today, the death number is one-fourth of that (less than 5,000 per year on average), and this with a much larger workforce and more people working longer. So strides have been made in that sense, that safety measures have been effective in keeping workers alive more often.
Another piece of good news is that the number of incidents have declined dramatically over the years – and this goes for incidents of all types, even those which result in no or very minor injuries. So not only are we getting fewer fatalities, but we are also lowering the numbers of overall incidents, which means more of our workers are working safety and being safe on the job.
There’s a But …
Of course, there is a “but” to go with this. There has to be, or I wouldn’t waste any blog space on giving out a bunch of platitudes. That is not how I work, for those of you who know me. I might be an optimist, but I’m also pragmatic.
Anyway, the “but” of course is the bad news about incidents. While we’ve done a great job lessening the incidents that happen, we are now seeing a higher percentage of incidents result in fatalities. The death risk for workers in incidents now is much higher than it was when we had a lot more incidents in general. If there is a problem on the job site, there is a decent shot that someone will die or at least have a life-threatening injury. How risky is it? In the United States, the risk of death is three times higher than in the United Kingdom, and is similar when compared to other developed countries.
Fewer Injuries, More Deaths?
Safety consultant James Loud wrote an interesting piece in a recent issue of Professional Safety magazine, addressing the disturbingly high risk of death among workplace incidents and wanted to take a deeper look into how we pursue safety and perhaps turn some concepts on their head.
The questions he mainly wanted to answer in his article were expressed early on:
- Are we, as safety officers, putting too much stress on the quantity of the incidents and not on the “quality” of the incidents (the “higher” quality incidents resulting in fatalities)?
- Is there too much focus on “Goal Zero” for incidents in that companies are not reporting some incidents and safety officers are focusing more on the numbers than on the actual prevention of incidents?
- Are we paying too much attention to how our workers behave on the job, and not really looking at what fundamentally causes the worst incidents?
The Power of Three
Loud is apparently a big fan of the number three, because he addresses these three questions throughout his article using background lessons learned, how we got here and addressing some vital misconceptions.
In future posts I’ll get into Loud’s article as he discussed other “threes” in his article – he will discuss three well-publicized case studies of fatal incidents; look into the efforts of three prominent names in safety and their influence over safety culture even today; then will look into three (plus one) popular misconceptions about injuries and fatalities in workplace incidents.