October 26, 2011 (The Editor’s Desk is updated each business day.)

Private industry workplace injuries and illnesses decline in 2010

Nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses among private industry employers declined in 2010 to a rate of 3.5 cases per 100 equivalent full-time workers—down from 3.6 cases in 2009. The total recordable cases injury and illness incidence rate among private industry employers has declined significantly each year since 2002, when estimates from the Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses were first published using the current OSHA requirements for recording occupational injuries and illnesses.

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More than one-half of the 3.1 million private industry injury and illness cases reported nationally in 2010 were of a more serious nature that involved days away from work, job transfer, or restriction—commonly referred to as DART cases. These cases occurred at a rate of 1.8 cases per 100 full-time workers, unchanged from 2009. The rates for the two components of DART cases (cases involving days away from work and those requiring job transfer or restriction) also remained unchanged in 2010—1.1 and 0.8 cases per 100 full-time workers, respectively. (Components do not sum to total due to rounding.)

Manufacturing was the only private industry sector in 2010 in which the rate of job transfer or restriction cases exceeded the rate of cases with days away from work, continuing a 13-year trend.

Health care and social assistance (part of education and health services) experienced an incidence rate of injuries and illnesses of 5.2 cases per 100 full-time workers—down from 5.4 cases in 2009—and was the lone industry sector in which both reported employment and hours worked increased in 2010. (The incidence rate in education and health services was 4.8 per 100 full-time workers.)

Approximately 820,300 injury and illness cases were reported among state and local government workers combined in 2010, resulting in a rate of 5.7 cases per 100 full-time workers—significantly higher than the rate among private industry workers (3.5 cases per 100 workers), and relatively unchanged from the rate (5.8 cases) reported among these public sector workers in 2009.

These earnings data are from the Injuries, Illnesses, and Fatalities program. To learn more, see "Workplace Injuries and Illnesses — 2010" (HTML) (PDF), news release USDL-11-1502.

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