Workplace Safety

It is probably reasonable to assume that most employees in the developed world go to work each day in the belief that they can return home safely at the end of their workday. Yet the available data from a number of industrialized countries over the last 15 years suggests that this assumption is questionable. Workplace fatalities continue at an alarming rate. In 1995 and 1998, in the United States of America, there were more than 6,000 fatal work injuries. By 1999 there were approximately 833 fatal workplace injuries in Canada. The frequency of disabling work injuries is also staggering. For example, in 1995 there were approximately 3.6 million injuries requiring time off work in the United States, with approximately 1.1 million employees injured at work each year between 1993 and 1996 in the United Kingdom.

But these data only speak to the extent of the problem. The social meaning of these data can perhaps best be appreciated by comparing the number of people who die in workplace safety incidents with those who die from other causes. First, more people are killed each year in workplace safety incidents than are murdered each year in Canada. Others have extended this focus to show that workers are substantially more likely to be injured or killed on the job than they are to experience the same consequence at the hands of a criminal. Second, despite the understandable public attention given to illnesses, injuries, and fatalities from breast, prostate, or colorectal cancer, vehicular-related deaths, firearms, and AIDS, more people are still injured and killed each year in workplace safety incidents in the United Sates.

Despite the magnitude of these data, the issue of workplace safety has largely escaped the focus of psychological research. In this entry we consider three issues. We will first consider the nature and measurement of workplace safety. Thereafter, we address psychological factors at work that promote or detract from workplace safety. Last, we focus on some of the psychological consequences of workplace safety infractions.