Today's Workforce is Safer than Ever

By Joe Lazzara, President & CEO, Scientific Technologies Inc.

Occupational injuries and illnesses have dropped dramatically in the American workplace. According to a recent report issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, the working conditions in the United States have improved with each passing generation. The result is that the today's workforce is safer than ever.

The report concludes that the primary reasons for the decrease in the injury rates are twofold. First, a genuine improvement in working conditions driven by – no, not government regulations, but by a thriving market economy and competition! "Just as… free enterprise leads profit-seeking companies to vie for labor and customers, it works to meet employees’ desire for better working conditions, " states the Federal Reserve report. The Fed report does not specifically address the impact of regulations on improving safety in the workplace, although certainly a reasonable set of safety regulations, applied with a dash of enforcement and the intimidation of penalties, provided not only motivation, but also guidance and education.

The second trend leading to a reduced accident rate is that a much smaller percentage of the population is employed in grueling, hazardous occupations. For example, coal mine and oil field jobs are ranked as the second worst job occupation, after lumberjacking. In 1920, roughly one in every forty workers held these hazardous jobs. Today, only one in 1056 is employed in these arduous positions.

The numbers tell the story. In 1926, the injury rate was 230 injuries per thousand full-time workers in manufacturing. This decreased significantly to 80 injuries per thousand in 1999. Don’t think that much of this improvement was easily accomplished in the decades after the 1920s – much of this success has been attained since the 1970s. For example, non-fatal manufacturing injuries decreased from 153 per thousand employees in 1973 to 80 in 1999, a drop of 48%.


Reducing the On-the-job Death Rate

Even greater progress is evidenced in a striking reduction in the work-related death rate. On-the-job deaths are now at an all-time low. Starting from a rate of 428 per million workers in 1930, the decline has been dramatic and definite – to 214 in 1960, 134 in 1980 and 38 in 1999. Amazingly, just look at the past decade – the death rate fell by 56%, from 87 deaths per million workers in 1990 to 38 in 1999!

Perhaps even more surprising, one is now more than twice as likely to suffer an accidental death in the home than at work. The rate for accidental deaths in the home is over 100 per one million people in 1999, while the at-work rate was 38.


Working conditions, circa 1900s

Perhaps to better understand how far we have come in creating a safer work environment, it would be wise to examine what our forebears willingly endured for the privilege of a paycheck.

The Federal Reserve report provides a telling description: "Work was often brutal. Early factories were noisy, dirty, cold in the winter and hot in the summer. The labor itself was repetitive, physically exhausting and often dangerous. Modern workers can hardly imagine what days were like for glue stirrers, lime burners, gravediggers and acid mixers."

The workday was 10 hours, Monday through Friday, plus 5 hours on Saturday. Don’t be late punching in – even by a minute. Breaks were infrequent, lunch was from a sack and thermos; there was no eating, drinking, talking or singing on the job.

The book Working Conditions, Wages and Profits, published in 1920, offers insight into the daily safety and health concerns workers in the 1920s regularly faced, "Injury, fatigue, strain, excessive temperatures, high humidity, poor ventilation, inadequate sanitation, disease, hazardous chemicals, long hours, rigid schedules, boredom, and lack of toilet facilities."

Although this describes the 1920s, this passage could have easily been excerpted from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a riveting and vivid image of life and death in the 1900 era meatpacking industry. Published in 1906, this novel so offended the American public, it lead to the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration. Clearly, for much of America’s history, improving the working condition was not a high priority.

Where was the focus of management during the early industrial era? It was not on safety and health, but on improving productivity – led by the time and motion studies pioneered by engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor. A taskmaster armed with a stopwatch, Taylor would measure, scrutinize and analyze workers’ every movement, with the goal of increasing production and improving productivity. The toll on employees’ bodies, with increasing repetitive motion tasks, was high. During the Industrial Age, factory workers often were permanently injured, performing the same task hour after hour, day after day.

It’s No Accident

The dramatic decline in at-work injuries, illnesses and deaths could have only been accomplished with across the board improvements in working conditions for all sectors of the economy. In fact, the riskier industries have shown the greatest reductions in injury rates. Manufacturing reduced injury rates by 48%, from 153 nonfatal injuries per 1000 employees in 1973 to 80 in 1999. Construction - the other large, historic industry with a high accident rate - improved from 198 to 84 for the same years, an advancement of 58%.

Even industries with low accident rates showed improvement. Using finance, insurance and real estate as an example, the injury rate for these sectors decreased from 24 in 1973 to 16 in 1999. Thus, in every industry sector, safety in the workplace continues to make positive progress.


Life is inherently risky, but businesses have incentives to reduce risks at work so as to attract and retain valuable, productive employees. That's why the death rate at work has declined far more than that at home over the past 70 years. Work related deaths have dropped by 91 percent - from 419 per million employees annually in 1928 to 38 per million today - while deaths at home are down just 57 percent. Smart Machines, increasingly prevalent in the New Economy, are helping cut injuries and death rates even further. Graph and data reprinted with permission and courtesy of Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

The Demise of the Repetitive Motion Job and the Shift to Safer Industries

Perhaps Taylor’s focus on productivity helped give rise to the creation of the first assembly line, which, in the its modern incarnation, has generated new and better jobs for production workers, replacing repetitive jobs with automation; creating technical and professional positions to further improve the workplace. We are no longer just employees – we are now knowledge workers.

During the first half of the 20th century, nonfarm manual jobs – such as laborers, craftsmen, operators, assemblers, peaked at 41% of all occupations in 1950. Since then, this percentage has been steadily declining and now makes up 25% of total U.S. employment in 2000. Furthermore, the 20 job positions classified by the Bureau of Labor Statistics with the highest incidence of repetitive motion injury – such as production testers, assemblers, upholsterers, machine operators, hand packers, etc. – have fallen significantly, from 11.3% in 1970 to 6.9% in 2000. Our economic base of employment in the U.S. has reduced its reliance on jobs most prone with repetitive motion.

Besides the decrease in the repetitive motion occupations, several other shifts in employment have contributed to the U.S. reduction in accident rates. The growth of so-called white-collar jobs – managers, professionals, salespeople and administrative positions – have increased from 37% of total occupations in 1950 to 60% in 2000. Over the years, we have also become much more of a service economy, and such occupations, like the white-collar jobs, are accompanied by good safety records. From 1973 to 1999, the large, catchall category of other services jobs increased from 20% to 34%.

The progress Americans have made in reducing the at-work accident and death rates during the last century is attributable to many aspects of our society and economy: the achievements and competition of modern capitalism, the creation of technical and professional positions, the advancement of automation, and the recognition that the modern employee is to be well coddled, well trained and well empowered. We must continue to ensure a safe workplace, not only for the American workforce of today, but for the workforce of tomorrow.

Be safe out there!

References: Cox, Michael W. and Alm, Richard, Have a Nice Day! The American Journey to Better Working Conditions. Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Annual Report 2000.

Price, C.W., Orval Simpson, Dale Wolf et al., Working Conditions, Wages and Profits. Chicago: A.W. Shaw, 1920.

Lazzara on Safeguarding is a regular column written for Plantautomation.com and Safetyonline.com. It also regularly appears at vertacross.com, the Precision Metalforming Association's member website, and in Plant Safety & Maintenance magazine.

Joseph J. Lazzara is President and CEO of Scientific Technologies, Inc ("STI"), the largest provider of automation safeguarding solutions in North America (www.sti.com).

Joe began his career with Hewlett Packard in 1973 where he had responsibility for safety and environmental issues for one of HP's largest divisions. After several other positions at HP in environmental, process and engineering management, Lazzara joined Scientific Technologies, Inc. (STI) in 1981 as Vice President and became President in 1989 and then
President and CEO in 1993.

He has a Bachelor of Environmental Engineering degree from Purdue University and a Masters in Business Administration degree from Santa Clara University.

Joe is the Chairman of the Safety, Health and Environmental Committee for the Association of Manufacturing Technology (AMT). He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the American Electronics Association (AEA), the nation's largest high-tech trade association.