Workplace injuries in Canada have been more or less consistently on the decline for decades. Through the middle of the nineteen-eighties, there was an average of nearly 50 workplace injuries per 1,000 employed workers—that averages out to a rate of five percent! Today, instances of workplace injury have dropped nearly fivefold, to a rate of just over one percent. Still, even a rate of one percent means that 10 in every 1000 workers will face a workplace injury at some point in their working lives. Since there are approximately 16.5 million employed workers in Canada, that means over 200,000 injured workers. But, as back injury attorneys know, not all employed individuals are at equal risk.
General Workplace Injury Stats
As you might expect, blue-collar industries, where workers engage in physically strenuous activity for extended periods of time, tend to have higher rates of personal injury. The highest-risk sectors of the blue-collar workforce are construction, manufacturing, fishing, and transportation. Back injury attorneys can attest to the fact that the demographic information pertaining to workplace injury subsequently reflects those industries. For instance, those industries’ workplaces have far more men than women, and men have higher rates of workplace injury than women. That being said, there is a discrepancy between the ratio of men to women in blue-collar industries and the rates of male and female workplace injury. Men are injured at a rate of 18.8 per 1,000 and women at 11.2 per 1,000, a gap of only 0.76 percent. In other words, though men are more likely to suffer a workplace injury overall, women have disproportionately higher risk level.
Other Injurious Industries
Outside of the high-risk areas of production, shift workers have not only a higher than average risk of workplace injury but also a higher likelihood of sustaining lasting injuries. A recent study by the Institute for Work & Health (IWH) added to previous research indicating the “adverse health consequences of night, evening, and rotating shift work”. Using data from Statistics Canada, the IWH followed over 17,000 adult Canadians over a span of 15 years, surveying them on a number health issues. They found that two years after their injuries, accounting for age, gender, physicality of work, and education, previously injured shift workers had poorer self-reported health scores than previously injured non-shift workers. Furthermore, the injured shift-workers’ scores were lower than uninjured shift workers’ (indicating that it isn’t merely the work itself that causes health issues).
What this ultimately means is that shift work inhibits people’s ability to recover after an injury. The researchers theorize a reason: shift workers are less inclined to take time off their job after an injury for fear of being terminated. They instead continue working through their injuries, leading to persistent health issues.
For back injury attorneys, workplace injury is one of the most common cases. If you’ve been injured in the workplace, regardless of the industry or the specific cause, contact a Toronto personal injury lawyer. They’ll give you aid and support to ensure you get the compensation you need.
Sources:
http://www.iwh.on.ca/at-work/82/injured-shift-workers-report-poorer-health-outcomes-than-injured-day-workers-study
http://well-being.esdc.gc.ca/misme-iowb/.3ndic.1t.4r@-eng.jsp?iid=20
http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/as-sa/99-012-x/99-012-x2011002-eng.cfm