Marking its 11th year, the annual Workplace Safety Index combines information from Liberty Mutual, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and the National Academy of Social Insurance to identify the top causes of serious workplace injuries.
Using injury event definitions developed by the BLS, researchers rank those injuries that cause an employee to miss six or more days from work by total workers compensation costs.
The latest Workplace Safety Index provides statistics for injuries that occurred in 2008, the most recent year for which data are available. The top five injury causes, overexertion, fall on same level, bodily reaction, struck by object, and fall to lower level, accounted for 71% of the total 2008 cost burden. Overexertion, which includes injuries related to lifting, pushing, pulling, holding, carrying, or throwing, maintained its first place rank, costing businesses $13.40 billion in direct costs. Consistent with past years, this event category accounted for more than one- quarter of the overall national burden. Fall on same level ranked second as a leading cause of disabling injury. This category claimed direct costs of $8.37 billion and accounted for 15.7% of the total 2008 injury burden. Bodily reaction, which includes injuries resulting from an incident of free bodily motion (such as bending, climbing, reaching, standing, sitting, or slipping or tripping without falling), ranked third at $5.40 billion. Struck by object took the fourth-place ranking at $5.36 billion. Fall to lower level ranked fifth at $5.29 billion in costs. The latter three categories each made up 10% of the total injury burden and were very close in rank. The costs of the combined fall categories, $13.67 billion, slightly exceeded the costs of overexertion. This demonstrates that falls, when considered together, were comparable to overexertion in terms of impact on the overall cost burden. Click Here for the entire 2010 Safety Index from Liberty Mutual.
