When you get ready to head to work in the morning, you hope and expect that nothing bad will happen on the job today. Working in construction, you know that there is a risk of injury or death if something goes wrong. Normally, if you're hurt on the job, you can make a claim for workers' compensation or additional payments that your attorney will be able to explain. Still, no one wants these injuries to happen. Are they common?
While construction fatalities have risen to a six-year high, the statistics are a bit misleading. There were 874 construction-related deaths in 2014, up a total of six percent from 2013. However, when you adjust for the number of workers in the workforce, you can see that the number of fatalities has actually dropped in relation to the number of people working.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the fatality level has dropped, it's still higher than the lowest record that took place in 2011. That year, there were around 9.1 deaths per 100,000 full-time workers. Now, that number has reached 9.5 workers per 100,000.
With a continued rise in the number of fatalities, the deputy director of the Center for Construction Research and Training has said that he is concerned. It makes it important for companies and the organizations responsible for workplace safety to continue pushing for safer workplaces and practices. In particular, workers in the oil-and-gas industry working with extraction have been at a higher risk, so those areas are being more thoroughly addressed to help bring down the risk to those workers.