Progression Or Regression? Occupational Fatalities Fall But Injuries Rise

Progression Or Regression? Occupational Fatalities Fall But Injuries Rise

The American Federation of Labor & Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) published its annual report Death on the Job: The Toll of Neglect in April, which assesses the current state of workplace health and safety at both a national and state level. The report highlighted that poor workplace safety laws and policies caused 5,283 deaths on the job in 2023, with a further 135,304 workers dying from occupational diseases. The job fatality rate for 2023 decreased to 3.5 per 100,000 workers, which was slightly lower than the 2023 rate. However, rates of injuries moved in the opposite direction, with serious workplace injuries increasing to 4.3 per 10,000 workers.

Further statistics indicate that the industry with the highest fatality rates in 2023 was agriculture, forestry and fishing, at 20.3 per 100,000 workers, followed by mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction at 16.9 per 100,000 workers. These are high-risk industries where workers are regularly exposed to hazards that can harm their health and safety. The report went on to highlight some of the major drivers behind workplace injuries. These included musculoskeletal disorders from repetitive motion injuries – which account for approximately 28% of all serious work-related injuries – failure to report workplace incidents, and exposure to harmful chemicals. All three drivers are common in high- and very-high-risk industries, where EHS best practices are extremely important and must be followed closely to ensure the safety of all workers.

EHS software can help minimize some of these causes of serious injury. For example, musculoskeletal disorders can be prevented through ergonomic-based risk assessments, which capture how repetitive actions from daily tasks can cause long-term injuries. To facilitate this, software vendor VelocityEHS leverages a 3D motion-capture-enabled ergonomic solution that was built and trained on a proprietary data set of 7 million images of occupational tasks.

Another issue is the underreporting of EHS observations and incidents, which creates a limited view of current safety performance for senior leaders. This makes it difficult to identify current hazards and potential risks that could lead to a more serious event in the future. One solution is EHS mobile applications that enable frontline workers to report observations directly into the system in real time, providing a wealth of data for senior leaders to help make better informed decisions about worker safety. Encouraging frontline workers to engage with safety data and protocol will help create a more safety-conscious workforce that adheres to best practices, reducing the risk of a serious incident occurring.

In the agriculture, chemical manufacturing, construction and pharmaceutical industries, exposure to harmful substances can be a common occurrence. EHS software modules, such as chemicals management, enable decision-makers to track the use of dangerous substances across the organization to a granular level, providing safer alternatives, and ensuring that their usage complies with relevant regulations.

Implementing solutions to these major issues could help reduce the number of serious injuries that occur across organizations. To read more about how EHS software can help combat these issues, head to the Verdantix research portal.