Blue-Collar Toll: Work-Injury Deaths Hit 10-Year Peak
“Workers should never, ever have to risk their lives to earn a paycheck.” — Jessica E. Martinez, co-executive director, National Council for Occupational Safety and Health.
By Steve Wishnia
Almost 5,500 workers in the U.S. died from on-the-job injuries in 2022, the highest number in the past 10 years, according to a report released Dec. 19 by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The bureau’s 2022 Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries counted 5,486 deaths from “sudden workplace trauma,” a 5.7% increase over 2021. The rate of deaths, 3.7 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers, was also the highest recorded in the past 10 years.
More than 70% of the victims worked in blue-collar jobs such as construction, driving trucks, and maintenance, and more than 90% were men.
“Workers should never, ever have to risk their lives to earn a paycheck,” Jessica E. Martinez, co-executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, said in a statement. She added that these deaths could be prevented “if employers listen to workers and adopt preventive and comprehensive safety measures.”
“Transportation incidents” accounted for more than 2,000 fatalities, about two-thirds of them in vehicle crashes. Falls, most commonly to a lower level of a structure, accounted for 865 deaths, and 839 came from exposure to poisons, electricity, or extreme heat. Older workers were most vulnerable, with 35% of those killed 55 or older.
Almost one out of every ten deaths was the result of homicide: There were 524 killings. That’s 8.9% more than in 2021. One-fourth involved workers “tending a retail establishment or waiting on customers,” the BLS said. About one-third of the victims were Afro-American, 15% were women, and 23% worked in “protective services” such as law enforcement, security, or firefighting.
These deaths include only those from sudden, single incidents. The number of workers who die from diseases “caused by long-term exposure to toxic chemicals and other preventable occupational hazards,” such as cancers and black lung, is much higher, COSH says. A study published in the Journal of Occupational Hygiene in 2014 estimated the U.S. toll at 95,000 a year, while the AFL-CIO’s annual “Death on the Job” report, released in April, estimated that in 2021, 120,000 workers died from occupational diseases.
The most hazardous group of occupations was farming, fishing, and forestry, with a fatal-injury rate of 23.5 per 100,000. Transportation and material moving was second most dangerous, with a death rate of 14.6, followed by construction and extraction, at 13.0, and protective services, at 10.1 per 100,000.
Black workers, at 4.2 fatal injuries per 100,000, and Latinos, at 4.6, were noticeably more likely to die on the job than the rest of the population. Among Latinos, foreign-born workers made up more than three-fifths of the victims, and 316 of those 792 immigrants were construction workers.
The figures also included 267 suicides and 525 drug overdoses, both up 13% over 2021.
National COSH’s recommendations to reduce preventable workplace injuries, illnesses, and fatalities include engaging workers in creating comprehensive safety programs and solutions, such as safety committees; enforcing protections for whistleblowers, regardless of their immigration status; employers developing effective programs to prevent workplace violence; establishing nationwide standards to protect workers from extreme heat; system-wide controls to protect health-care workers from infectious diseases; and increased funding for the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
The AFL-CIO report noted that even though the number of federal OSHA inspectors was increased from 755 to 900 in the 2021 fiscal year, it would still take them 190 years to inspect every U.S. workplace once.
It added that “data no longer is reported annually” to track major problems such as musculoskeletal disorders from repetitive motion injuries and occupational heat illness.
The BLS reported 51 deaths from exposure to temperature extremes in 2022, 43 from “environmental heat.” Public Citizen, in a report released in May, said that number “grossly underestimates actual heat-related occupational fatalities.” The data, it said, is “notoriously problematic” because medical records might only indicate the immediate cause of death, such as kidney failure, without noting the underlying cause.
OSHA’s guidelines on tracking injuries and deaths caused by excessive heat, Public Citizen added, only cite heat illness, heatstroke, kidney injury, and rhabdomyolysis, a condition where damaged muscle tissue releases proteins and electrolytes that can injure the heart and kidneys into the blood. If factors such as a worker falling off a scaffold after becoming dizzy from heat stress were counted, the report estimated, the total toll of workers who lose their lives to heat in the U.S. might be as high as 2,000 a year.