Who Is Most Likely to Get Hurt on the Job? You Might Be Surprised

livemint.com:

Logic might tell you that the people most likely to suffer workplace accidents are those who do the most dangerous jobs. A recent study, however, finds that isn’t the case.

According to researchers, workers whose occupations are extremely dangerous—from wellhead pumpers on oil rigs to boilermakers—are actually less likely to get injured on the job than workers with moderately hazardous jobs, such as airport baggage handlers, welders and pest-control workers. In one experiment, the researchers used data from the Labor Department in 2019 to determine the injury rate for 571 occupations.

They found that the injury rate for dangerous professions such as wellhead pumpers and boilermakers was about three per thousand workers, compared with 23 per thousand for pest-control specialists, 43 per thousand for baggage handlers and almost 120 per thousand for welders. When moderate is dangerous In fact, when the authors plotted out their results from this study, they found an inverted U shape, with accidents per thousand workers highest for jobs often considered moderately hazardous and lower for jobs often considered more dangerous.

Less-hazardous professions such as human-resource specialist or loan officer had low injury rates, as one might expect. The authors found a similar inverted U-shaped pattern in a second study in which they used data from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada to plot the correlation between the number of maritime accidents and sea and wind conditions.

They found that the highest accident rate happened when sea and wind conditions were slightly elevated or moderately hazardous. “Workers tend to behave differently when they know the situation is very dangerous," says James Beck, an associate professor