As part of a larger effort to ensure healthier and safer workplace environments, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is setting aside the week of August 7 to the 13th as “Safe + Sound Week.”
The effort, said Doug Parker, OSHA assistant secretary, is designed to highlight the things that employers can do to enhance workplace safety, noting: “We want businesses to have a system, and not just good intentions, and make safety a core value for every worker in every workplace.”
The Safe + Sound Week program was originally launched in the summer of 2017 and was defined by OSHA then as a “new nationwide effort that calls on organizations of all sizes in a wide range of industries to raise awareness of the value and importance of workplace safety and health programs.”
The initiative is designed to mitigate a challenge that is some ways has proven almost impossible to do away with entirely: in December, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported just under 5,200 fatal work injuries for 2021.
That figure, while significantly lower than those recorded in a less safety rules-stringent era in the 1950s when the injury rate was ranged between 13,000 to 16,000 annually, nevertheless represented an 8.9% increase over the year 2020.
Those rather astoundingly high 1950s numbers, notes the publication EHS Today, “were almost all attributed to traumatic injuries from falls, electrocution, and machine hazards.”
By far, according to the BLS, the greatest number of fatal work injuries, at more than 1,000, took place in the construction industry. Transportation and warehousing recorded 805 fatalities, followed by the agriculture, forestry, and fishing industries at 511.
Recent OSHA safety initiatives have additionally gone well beyond addressing the physical workplace hazards that accounted for such large numbers in the 1950s.
“Mental health, workplace stress, and suicide have very real work-related implications,” says an OSHA press release, noting in particular that the suicide rate in the nation’s construction industry is currently “3.5 times higher than that of the general population.”
By Garry Boulard
