Study: U.S. worker fatality rate 3X higher than U.K.’s
Construction industry rate even higher
Workers in the United States were killed on the job at three times the rate of their peers in the United Kingdom in 2010, according to a study published online Sept. 30 in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine. Authors John Mendeloff, and Laura Staetsky, both PhDs, also found that U.S. construction workers' fatality rate was four times the U.K. rate in 2010 — a difference that has grown substantially since the 1990s.
For the study,Occupational fatality risks in the United States and the United Kingdom, Mendeloff and Staetsky compared the rate of work injury fatalities (excluding deaths due to highway motor vehicle crashes and those due to violence) identified by the U.S. Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries in recent years with the number reported to the Health and Safety Executive in the United Kingdom (UK) and by other European Union (EU) members through Eurostat.