Here are some figures I just picked up from my Bonegarde Safety Briefing for April 27, 2011
Tragedy in NumbersIn the US, an average of 16 workers die each day from injuries received at work, and 134 are estimated to die from work-related diseases. And approximately 9,000 American workers are treated in emergency wards each day because of occupational injuries.
In Canada, approximately three workers die on the job every day and more than 900,000 workplace injuries are reported every year.
I’d been fishing around on the Internet trying to find those numbers and, as is often the case, they just popped up on my desk in an article I received from a quite reliable source.
If you would compare these figures with those for 1948 when I first started working in this safety business it would appear to be a fantastic improvement. If you would look at these numbers as the father or son of one of those workers killed then it would appear to be a sad and tragic performance. Such a comparison would not be very valid anyway because America is no longer a manufacturing nation, not in the sense that it was back then.
There used to be a saying and then a song that went, “You’ve come a long way Baby, but Baby you’ve still got a long way to go.” So too in the safety field, we still have a long way to go. But the question arises, are we now truly headed in the right direction?
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