Dive Brief:

• Twelve of the 25 most dangerous jobs as measured by the rate of people who die at work are in the construction industry, according to a recent report from business insurance analysis firm AdvisorSmith.

• The report found that self-employed workers were 3.3 times more like to die on the job, compared to hourly and salaried employees, by a wide margin. There were just 2.9 fatalities per 100,000 workers among salaried and wage workers, while that number jumped to 9.4 per 100,000 for the self employed.

• Many of the most dangerous jobs offer average salaries that are below the May 2019 annual mean wage of $53,490, and companies that hire workers with the most dangerous jobs have workers’ compensation insurance premiums that are higher than average, the report found.

Dive Insight:

The construction industry jobs that made the list of the top 25 most dangerous jobs include:

• derrick workers, who set up and operate drilling equipment
• roofers
• ironworkers
• crane operators
• landscaping supervisors
• highway and general maintenance workers
• mining machine operators
• cement masons

The new data come even as overall safety rates for both fatal and nonfatal injuries within construction improved between 1992 and 2015, with fatal outcomes down about 30% over that time period, according to the Center for Construction Research and Training (CPWR), a Silver Spring, Maryland-based safety consultancy.

Those better safety outcomes for construction overall emerged as the industry adopted a zero-tolerance policy toward dangerous working conditions and an increased focus on safety. But on a relative basis, as the AdvisorSmith report shows, construction still accounts for nearly half of the most deadliest jobs in America.

Across the broader economy, on-the-job deaths have been rising in recent years, from 4,821 in 2014 to 5,250 in 2018, an increase of 9%. But that rise also came during a time of increased employment. Adjusted for the number of workers on the job, the death rate went up approximately 2.2%.

Those trends are also reflected in CPWR’s more recent numbers, as well. For example, in 2015, 985 construction workers died from work-related injuries, accounting for 20% of the total 4,836 fatal workplace injuries in the United States, which was more than any other industry.

The year 2011 marked the lowest number of deaths in construction in recent years at 781, according to CPWR, but rose 26% to 985 by 2015, the most recent year in CPWR’s analysis.  

Top 25 Most Dangerous Jobs in America

Source: AdvisorSmith