Here's the rate of on-the-job injuries over the past three decades:
This is not merely an artifact of job composition, either. If you look, say, only at manufacturing jobs or health care, the injury rate has dropped the same amount. Hooray for OSHA!
11 thoughts on “Random factoid of the day: Your job is getting safer”
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The Code works. But if you listen to some circles, those codes stifle growth, dampen opportunity, strangle profit.
Darn Government overreach. Taking away managements God given right to kill their employees.
Robots have taken over some of the more dangerous/toxic things.
Also, the more nasty jobs have been moved out of our country.
A side effect on the "War on Coal"! Fewer miners die on the job.
To look at the results of web searches Sochi as “worker safety site:motherjones.com” one would expect the opposite.
Such as …
I don't know what this "rate" is. 4% of people are injured every year? Seems like a lot unless you count stubbed toes and pinched skin. But I will agree with Kevin that having it go down so much is one of the many benefits of living in the 21st century.
The rate in Kevin’s chart is 2.2 percent. And yes, that does include a lot of things you probably wouldnt think twice about.
If one of my workers incurs a cut that draws blood, or falls off a ladder, or drops something heavy on his foot, for example, I have to take steps to ascertain the extent of his injury and I have to report it to my Company Safety Officer. That process creates an entry in our system, which ends up as a statistic on our annual OSHA 300 report.
The OSHA 300 distinguishes between lost-time accidents and no-lost-time accidents, but they are all counted.
Yup. Many years ago, I suffered a cut on my hand at work. The first aid attendant disinfected it and put a bandage on it, and I was made to wear a glove on that hand until the cut healed. It was a reported accident. Fortunately, it didn't result in lost time, because the crew I was on had just received an award for 10,000 man-shifts without a lost time accident, and they would have been seriously annoyed if I had put them back to zero.
Like the voting rights act or the environmental protection act, OSHA is working so well we should get rid of it.
- so says five or six Supreme Court justices in the next few years
The Williams - Steiger Safety Act was one of the last truly bipartisan bills
Williams was a house DEM and Steiger was a Senate Republican IIRC. Signed into law by Nixon
It will not get eliminated
It serves a political purpose for BOTH parties to use at election time.