Did you get through the last year without losing any days to injury? Or maybe you missed a week as you recovered? Those sound like massively different situations (and they are), but the truth is that you’re lucky if you’re in either camp.
The average, after all, is 11 days per year. The cost of that is about $1,560 for each person, per year. Clearly, injuries are a major issue that cost businesses a lot of money.
Now, there are a few things to point out about those stats. One is that they do not count fatal injuries. These still represent a loss to the workforce until someone else is hired, and they also carry a cost, but they did not factor into the data.
The second thing to remember, naturally, is that the injuries are not spread out evenly at all. Sure, there are people who actually missed 11 days last year. But you also have people who missed a single day, pulling the average down, and people who did not work for the entire year, increasing that average again. If you didn’t get injured last year, just know that plenty of people missed more than 11 days to make up for it.
Regardless of the specifics, these stats do show just how common workplace injuries are and how much time — and money — workers stand to lose out on every year. Fortunately, there are workers’ compensation policies that can help cover things like lost wages and medical bills. Injured workers need to know exactly what rights and options they have.
