On-the-job deaths declining, CDC says

WASHINGTON – Fewer and fewer Americans are coming home from work in coffins.

It’s a long-term trend in workplace safety that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, the nation’s top public-health authority, considers “one of the greatest health achievements in the 20th century.”

Today’s workplaces are roughly 40,000 lives a year safer than they were in the 1930s, according to the CDC. By way of comparison, 40,000 U.S. women died of breast cancer last year and 42,000 Americans died on highways.

The biggest factors in improving workplace safety, analysts say, are:

•The expansion of U.S. service industries, which are relatively safe;

•Tougher worker-safety standards, whether voluntary or imposed under laws such as the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act;

•The reduction or export of high-risk mining, metals and manufacturing jobs;

•An increase in the number of working women, whose accident rate is about a tenth that of men;

•A decline in the number of small farms, where worker fatalities always have been high. “The kids didn’t get to use the new $50,000 tractor,” explained Guy Toscano, the retired director of the census of fatal occupational injuries at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “They got the old one without the roll bar and the other safety equipment.”

On farms, as in other workplaces at earlier times, fatalities fell after safer machinery and processes kicked in. In mines, for example, an average of 3,329 Americans a year died on the job from 1911 to 1915, industry tallies show. Last year, 159 miners died, according to the BLS workplace-fatality census.

Similarly, at least 61 U.S. industrial workers per 100,000 died on the job in 1913, according to the best BLS estimate. These days, 4 per 100,000 is the rate for all U.S. workers.

The comparisons are rough because the data collected have varied over the years. The BLS counts only people who are killed on the job, not those injured, who are far more numerous, or those felled years later by work-linked diseases, such as black lung among coal miners. Nonetheless, scholars and federal agencies tend to rely on BLS figures because they’re based on death certificates, are relatively complete and are collected by consistent methods.

The latest numbers, released in August, showed that commercial fishing is the most dangerous U.S. job. Logging is second, followed by piloting or navigating planes, working in structural iron and steel on construction sites, and collecting refuse. The safest fields are office work and professions such as law, medicine, accounting and architecture.

Overall, workplace deaths totaled 5,702 for 2005, about 200 shy of the all-time low in 2003.

Three of the four leading causes of workplace fatalities are holding steady: highway deaths, falls and a category called “struck by object.” There’s been progress in the fourth: homicides. Convenience store employees and gas station operators are the main beneficiaries. About 75 percent of workplace killings begin as robberies.

While the overall workplace-fatality numbers show dramatic improvement, they also show that the gains are unequal. Fatalities among Hispanic men, for example, are up, especially in the South, where workplaces are more dangerous than the rest of the nation, according to Dana Loomis, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina’s School of Public Health in Chapel Hill.