“The Body Counts Continue”

By Phil La Duke

As the safety professionals nestled in the serene bosom of the holidays, the Bureau of Labor Statistics dropped a shattering revelation. The news came like a hammer through a plate glass window; sudden and jarring. Workplace fatalities have risen to their highest rate since 2008. The fact that overall injuries have continued to fall year after year has lulled safety professionals into thinking that the workplace over all has become safer; we sit and congratulate ourselves on a job well done, ignoring the fatal fly in the ointment that the trend in workplace fatalities has stayed flat and now has spiked upward.

In this Twittering Trump, Brexit, post-fact world that fact that people are continuing to die at work doesn’t seem to matter; we congratulate ourselves none-the-less. Our leaders both within Safety and in our core businesses continue to count bandages. Despite injury counts and rates…