Another large
cluster of injuries and illnesses--more than
one-third of the total--took place between
four and eight hours on the job. The
remainder, about 7 percent, were distributed
across longer shifts, according to the new
survey.
A 2002 rule
change by the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration requires employers to provide
additional information on workplace injury
and illness records, including the time and
day of the week when a worker is injured or
becomes ill, as well as how many hours into
a shift the individual had worked.
However, to
date not all employers have provided the new
information. BLS said that in 266,900 cases
with days-away-from work in 2002, employers
did not report a time of incident.
Although
cases were fairly evenly distributed from
Monday through Friday, that was not the case
among high-incident occupations, the agency
said. Occupations with a greater proportion
of injuries and illnesses on Mondays
included truck drivers (20.8 percent),
janitors and cleaners (19.8 percent), and
carpenters (23 percent).
Cooks and
sales workers had a greater proportion of
their injuries and illnesses on Thursdays
and Fridays, the agency said. The percentage
of injuries and illnesses occurring on those
two days was 37 percent for cooks and 35
percent for workers in sales occupations.
The majority
of injuries and illnesses happened during
day shift hours, defined as 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
But the 10 occupations with the greatest
number of injuries and illnesses experienced
more cases between the hours of 8 a.m. and
noon than during other periods.
The
distribution of injuries did reflect the
nature of 24-hour work in some occupations.
For example, in the nursing aides,
orderlies, and attendants category, 21
percent of the incidents took place between
midnight and 8 a.m.
The analysis
found that the median times away from work
for recuperation after an injury or illness
was seven days. This varied little based on
time of day or day of the week of the
injury. However, the report said there is a
noticeable increase in the median days when
an employee had been on the job for more
than 14 hours when an event occurred.
Nursing
aides, orderlies, and attendants experienced
a sharp increase in median days away from
work when injured while working between 11
and 12 hours into their shift, as did
construction laborers, according to the
report.
BLS's workplace injuries and illnesses data
are available at
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/osh.pdf.
