South Florida Injury Attorney Blog

In late October, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics finally released its statistical report on nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses in 2007. As a Florida construction accident and workers' compensation lawyer, I was pleased to see that both the raw number of injury cases and the rate have gone down slightly since 2006. The agency reports 4 million overall cases of injury or illness in the workplace, down from 4.1 million in 2006, while the rate per 100 workers dropped from 4.4 in 2006 to 4.2 in 2007. (These numbers apply only to private industry; government workers are not counted.) Happily for us here in Florida, our state's rate of injury or illness is actually below the national rate -- 3.9 cases per 100 workers.

According to the agency, five individual industries saw declines: mining, construction, manufacturing, health care and social assistance, and the category of agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting. This is interesting in part because among those categories are some of the most dangerous industries in the United States. Construction, mining, agriculture/fishing/hunting and manufacturing are all well-known as some of the most dangerous civilian jobs in the United States, with high fatality and injury rates. About half of the injury or illness cases were considered serious, said the Bureau of Labor Statistics, meaning that the worker needed time off to recover, a job restriction or a temporary transfer. That number also fell, from 2.3 cases per 100 workers in 2006 to 2.1 in 2007.

The vast majority of the cases in the study were injuries, not illnesses, which accounted for 3.8 million of the four million reported cases. Health care is not among these, but the agency did note that it saw a sharp decline in skin diseases, which we hope reflects a drop in preventable hospital staph outbreaks. Among business types, general medical and surgical hospitals had by far the most cases of injury or illness, more than 253,500. That's far more than the number of cases in the next largest industry, general merchandise stores, which had about 142,000 cases.

Workplace injuries are important. People who work 40 hours a week spend about a third of their waking lives at work, where they cannot always control their working conditions. Federal and state workplace safety laws are supposed to help ensure a secure workplace and Florida workers' compensation laws are supposed to help workers get help after an injury. Unfortunately, employers and others sometimes ignore these laws in an effort to save money, regardless of the cost in human lives, pain or suffering. If you've been injured at work in South Florida and would like to learn more about your legal rights, my firm, Cohn, Smith & Cohn can help. Please contact us as soon as possible to set up a free consultation.