May 24, 2002—The ten leading causes of disabling workplace injuries account for 86 percent of the estimated $40 billion in wage and medical payments made to workers injured on the job in 1999, the last year for which data is available, according to the second annual Liberty Mutual Workplace Safety Index recently announced by Liberty Mutual Group, a provider of workers’ compensation insurance products and services.
Liberty Mutual identified the leading causes of disabling workplace injuries and their associated direct costs using its own data combined with findings from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Academy of Social Insurance. The causes are, in order of rank from first to last:
- Overexertion: Estimated direct costs, $10.3 billion
- Fall on the same level: Estimated direct costs, $4.6 billion
- Bodily reaction: Estimated direct costs, $3.8 billion
- Fall to lower level: Estimated direct costs, $3.7 billion
- Struck by object: Estimated direct costs, $3.4 billion
- Repetitive motion: Estimated direct costs, $2.7 billion
- Highway accidents: Estimated direct costs, $2.4 billion
- Struck against object: Estimated direct costs, $1.7 billion
- Caught in or compressed by equipment: Estimated direct costs, $1.6 billion
- Contact with extreme temperatures: Estimated direct costs, $400 million
For more information, contact Liberty Mutual.
