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As thousands enter the workforce, there were 43 fewer workplace fatalities in 2017 than the previous year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ National Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries in 2017 (CFOI) report. The fatal injury rate also decreased from 3.6% in 2016 to 3.5% in 2017.
You may not think of carrying holiday dishes, decorations and gifts as “manual materials handling,” but that’s what it amounts to. The amount of lifting, carrying, hanging, and hauling that your workers do during the holidays may well exceed what they do at other times of the year. All that lifting and carrying puts them […]
It could be a long, cold winter. If your workers have to dig out, can they do it without hurting themselves? Most workers know that shoveling snow and breaking up ice can be exhausting, but they may not be aware of the extent of their risks.
It was the week before Thanksgiving 2014, and the Hardman family was on their way to a dream family vacation at Disney World in Orlando, when the family’s 16-year-old son, who was driving, briefly nodded off at the wheel. Six of the eight passengers were not wearing seat belts; all six were ejected from the […]
34-year-old James Byrnes of North Beach, Maryland, was working from a ladder, hanging Christmas lights at his neighbor’s home in December 2013, when he came into contact with an overhead power line and was electrocuted. That same month, 13-year-old Georgia Marshall of Barry, South Wales, United Kingdom, was electrocuted while helping her father retrieve Christmas […]
Yesterday in our series on holiday hazards, we talked about the ways workers can hurt themselves when they’re trying to get at something that’s out of reach. But falls from elevations are not the only hazard workers face during the holidays; they may also be at increased risk from falls on the same level.
In October 2018, researchers associated with the California Department of Public Health (CDPH) issued a study showing that between 2007 and 2014, almost 140,000 workers in the state reported carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) workers’ compensation claims. This adds up to 6.3 claims per 10,000 full-time equivalent workers. While that figure by itself may not appear […]
In its November 2018 report on top management challenges for the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), the DOL’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) states that OSHA needs to complete initiatives to improve employer reporting of severe injuries and illnesses.
More people are surviving cancer, but cancer is occurring in more people (one factor associated with longer life spans). The most recent data compiled by the National Cancer Institute, which was released in April 2018, show that from 2006 to 2015 cancer death rates decreased by 1.8 percent among men and 1.4 percent among women. […]
Despite a 2014 OSHA rule that strengthened provisions that require employers to inform OSHA about work-related fatalities and serious injuries and illnesses, the Department of Labor’s (DOL) Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that OSHA’s data on these incidents are deficient as is its assurance that employers abated the hazards that contributed to the incidents.