The Most Dangerous Jobs

From Menletter September 2011

By Tim Baehr

Once again, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has issued its annual analysis of the most deadly jobs in the US. An article at Careerbuilder.com ("the Most Dangerous Jobs in America) summarizes the 2010 list as follows:

"Though the rate of fatal injury across all occupations in 2010 was 3.5 per 100,000 workers, in line with 2009, a number of jobs proved to be especially dangerous last year. The following 10 jobs all had fatal injury rates at least five times greater than average.

"Occupations with the highest rate of fatal work injuries (deaths per 100,000 workers):

1. Fishers and related fishing workers: 116

2. Logging workers: 91.9

3. Aircraft pilots and flight engineers: 70.6

4. Farmers and ranchers: 41.4

5. Mining machine operators: 38.7

6. Roofers: 32.4

7. Refuse and recyclable materials collectors: 29.8

8. Driver/sales workers and truck drivers: 21.8

9. Industrial machinery installation, repair and maintenance workers: 20.3

10. Police and sheriff's officers: 18.0

Given the fact that transportation accidents, assaults and violent attacks, and contact with objects and equipment are consistently the most common causes of fatal workplace injuries each year, it's not hard to see what makes these occupations so dangerous."

Check out the full article at http://tinyurl.com/fatal-work

The BLS report is here: http://tinyurl.com/BLS-fatalities; the last page contains the raw data that the Careerbuilder list was based on.

Notice that these occupations are mostly populated by males. It could be argued that the occupations traditionally don't welcome women into their ranks. On the other hand, for most of them, I haven't seen evidence that women are fighting to join them.

Why even bring this up? After all, things aren't likely to change, either through safety legislation or marches on Washington. And the numbers are small: only 4,547 people died last year, about 3.5 for every 100,000 workers. In the top ten, only 1484 people lost their lives. That's out of 200,000,000 full-time-equivalent workers. (See the BLS site.)

I think the stats speak to a general tendency in our society - by both men and women - to (1) automatically assume that men are more suited to dangerous physical work, and (2) not even think much about the workers - male and female, but mostly male - who do the dirty infrastructure work and heavy labor that allow the rest of us to luxuriate in our cubicles and corner offices. Without the workers who put their bodies at risk every day, we wouldn't have much of a society.

It's worth sharing the BLS information with our families and co-workers. If nothing else, we may come to appreciate how much we depend on those who work at the most dangerous jobs in America.