Texas led the nation with 461 total worker deaths in 2010, the most recent year for which complete data is available. Eighty-two of those were in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
The Texas total was about 10 percent of the national count of 4,547 and far ahead of No. 2 California, which reported 302 deaths, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Highway deaths are the No. 1 cause of workplace fatalities nationally, and Texas’ vast highway system could be a contributing factor.
The state’s healthier construction and drilling industries — two sectors with high injury rates — also play into the numbers.
But many blame the state’s lax workplace rules. ...“Workplace deaths in Texas are a sawtooth pattern,” said Karen Puckett, director of outreach and workplace safety for the workers’ compensation division of the Texas Department of Insurance. “It’s hard to detect any trend.”
Puckett’s agency is the state body charged with promoting worker safety. She says it’s unfair to cast Texas as a dangerous state without looking at per-capita injury rates in individual industries.
Puckett said that comparing Texas, which has booming construction, oil field and logging operations, to, say, Connecticut, where the insurance industry is a major employer and with only moderate construction and virtually no logging or oil field industries, creates a distortion.
“When you only look at the numbers in Texas, you aren’t getting the entire picture,” she said.
U.S. deaths down
Nationwide, workplace fatalities declined 16 percent from 2003 to 2010, from 5,575 to 4,690. During most of the 1990s, that figure was more than 6,000 per year.
The Texas workplace death toll hit a high of 528 in 2007, when construction was at a peak.
OSHA, the federal agency responsible for workplace safety, has increased construction workplace inspections 60 percent since 2003 and has focused on fall hazards, cave-in dangers, traffic control, distracted driving and heat-related injuries.
Ken Nibarger is a safety specialist with the United Steel Workers Union who investigated the aftermath of the BP Texas City refinery explosion. He says the rise of the temporary worker is a contributing factor to worker injuries and deaths. Those workers aren’t on site long enough to become familiar with the dangers of a certain plant or job.
Dallas lawyer Marquette Wolf, who has represented the families of workers killed on the job, says that “Texas is a great example of the boom-and-bust economy.”
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