People often wonder what the most dangerous occupation is, perhaps out of pure curiosity or maybe because they want to avoid going into that line of work. Perhaps they’re trying to discover what the safest occupation is so that they can take steps to work in that career.
What you’ll find is that it really depends on how you define the danger. But you can always use statistics to discover which occupations are the most dangerous.
The highest rate of fatal injuries
The first way to define this is by looking for the job that has the highest rate of fatal injuries. How many workers lose their lives for every 100,000 people in that occupation?
When you do this, the most dangerous job is logging. There were 56 total deaths in 2018. That provides a death rate of 111 fatal accidents for every 100,000 workers. You can see that the rate is higher than the total, and this is just a reflection of the fact that the logging industry is a relatively small one with under 50,000 workers employed in it. These workers have to do very physical tasks, and that has led to a fatal accident rate that is a staggering 33 times as high as the nationwide average.
The highest number of fatal injuries
The second way to look at this is by looking for the highest number of total fatal injuries in any industry. When you do this, the most dangerous industry is construction. This is true year in and year out. Construction workers have very dangerous job sites that they have to work on, they use power tools and heavy machinery and the highest number of employees pass away on the job every year.
The only reason that construction doesn’t rank higher than logging or other similar Industries is just that it is much larger. Because of how many people are working in construction, the rate of these fatal accidents is much lower.
Understanding the risks
If you work in one of these industries, it’s very important to understand the risks. This is also true if you have a family member who works in these industries, and you’re worried about them suffering fatal injuries in an accident. If this happens, then you need to know exactly what legal options you have.
