Moneybox

American Workplaces Have Gotten A Lot Safer

It’s been a little overshadowed by Boston, but the fertilizer explosion in Texas Wednesday night has shed a light on the crucial problem of workplace deaths and injuries.* The good news here is that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics we had about a 25 percent decline in workplace fatalities between 1993 and 2011. Even better the total number of jobs grew substantially during that period. Long story short, American workers are much less likely to die on the job today than they were a generation ago.

That’s obviously no comfort to those killed in Texas or their families but it is an important piece of perspective.

Correction, April 19, 2013: This post originally misstated the date of the fertilizer explosion in Texas.