You will often hear people say that construction is the most dangerous industry in the United States. They will talk about the severe risk of being injured on the job, and they will likely point to the fatal injury statistics. That’s what makes working in construction so hazardous.
From this perspective, it is true. Every year, construction has the most fatal accidents. It’s a very large industry with a lot of people working in it, which contributes to these overall stats.
Of course, construction is also inherently hazardous in many ways that other jobs are not. Workers have to use heavy machinery and work at heights, for example, drastically increasing the odds of injuries from a fall or from being caught in the machine – two of the main causes of serious accidents.
Fatal injury rates
However, there is another way to look at the statistics. Rather than considering the overall number of fatalities, look at the rate at which these fatal accidents happen.
If you do this, simply by calculating how many fatal accidents occur for every 100,000 workers in the industry, you’ll find that things like agriculture, hunting and fishing actually have higher fatality rates. There are far fewer people working in these industries, so they are not going to have the accident totals that you would see in construction. But the rate at which accidents happen is much higher, which means that, from this perspective, these industries are more dangerous.
What is clear is that workers can be injured in any type of job, and these risks always exist. Those who have been hurt or who have lost loved ones must know what legal options they have.
