Document Xz4bdL77EzQ1O777v4m14xnNJ

INDUSTRIAL INJURY RATES HAVE ALSO DECREASED FREQUENCY rate SEVERITY rate Fig 1-7 --The average American today has a better chance of avoiding accidental death than did the American of 20 or 40 years ago Left chart, hased on figures for the entire country, shows number of deaths is down even though number of workers is up Chart above, based on figures of companies reporting to the National Safetv Council, shows both the frequency and seventv of industrial accidents to be down, in general, even though industnal production has increased a national scale are quite different from the objectives in designing a safety program on a company or plant scale The first objective of a company or plant safety program is immediate and urgent-- to prevent the accident which might happen in the next minute or the next hour or the next day, week, or month Safetymen, unlike designers of a new piece of machinery, cannot look philosophically upon errors and breakdowns in the experi mental stage Since they deal with human lives, human health, and immediate efficiency and productivity, safetymen must deal with today's problems today On the other hand, they cannot be content to run from emergency to emergency They must consider the long-term effects of their work--the increase of knowledge, the im provement of techniques, the development of organizational forms which will serve them well next year and for many years to come Since the factors are complex, no simple rating scale can indicate an answer to the question, "What has the safety movement accomplished?" In the absence of such a rating scale, an attempt to answer the ques tion must be made by assembling several kinds of data Statistical evaluation First, the question must be asked, "Has the safety movement, in fact, done anything to prevent accidents m the past?" To that ques tion can be answered a clear "Yes'" If the annual accidental death rate per thousand of population which held from 1900 to 1912 had continued through 1968, there would have been over 1 3 million more accidental deaths than actually occurred Medical progress accounts for some of this gam, but the larger part is certainly the prod uct of organized safety work It is worth noting that though death rates for the entire population--that is, for all ages --from 1912 to 1968 declined 30 per cent, the death rate for persons of normal working age --25 to 64 years--declined more than 40 per cent Work accident death data do not antedate 9