18 Construction Workers Die Every Week

When you leave for work in the morning, you fully expect to come home that night. You’re just watching the clock and counting down the hours until you can return to a warm home, a family and a fulfilling dinner after a good day’s work.

Statistics show that, for 18 construction workers who leave home with those same plans every week, none of that comes true. They’re killed in a deadly accidents. Their children, spouses, siblings and parents are left to wonder why it happened and if anything could have been done to prevent it.

That statistic, which is based off of the accident stats from 2015, comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That year, a total of 937 workers lost their lives in the construction industry.

If that sounds terrible, it is, any way you look at it. No other sector had more deadly accidents. For instance, manufacturing is known to have inherent dangers as well, but construction was roughly three times as bad. When looking at all deadly accidents in the workplace for 2015, the construction industry made up a full 21.4 percent of them all on its own.

Things have been getting better in the grand scheme. Workers who started out in the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, have remarked on how many unneeded risks they would take back then that they’d never take today.

While progress is good, the statistics show that it has certainly not eliminated the risks, not by a long shot. If you’re hurt on the job, it’s very important for you to know all of the legal rights that you have.

Source: Safety Health, “As construction work increases, so do dangers,” Tom Musick, accessed Sep. 29, 2017