How many of your employees get hurt off the job? If you're like most safety professionals, you don't know the answer to that question. Nor do you know how your employees got hurt. What you do know is that off the job injuries cost a lot of money. But you probably don't know just how much. After all, these injuries aren't really your responsibility. Off the job injuries don't affect the number of recordable injuries and the (omnipotent) total recordable injury rate. So why should you care about them? And even if they were part of your domain, what could you do about off the job injuries anyway? This series will answer those questions.

The Frequency of Off the Job Injuries

One in 12 Americans will require medical attention from a hospital emergency room every year. So, on average, each person will suffer such an injury every 12 years.

Unless your company is actually doing something to improve off the job safety (or you have only a very small number of employees and averages are unreliable) these average injury rates probably apply to your own employees. If we assume the same number of exposure hours (in other words, we're not going to count sleeping) this translates into a TRIR of 8.3, which is 3.3 more than the national workplace average of 5.

So, on average, more people are getting hurt off the job than on the job. Interestingly enough, most safety professionals are aware of this.

The Costs of Off the Job Injuries

The National Safety Council (NSC) does a good job of tracking off the job injury costs and reporting the information to safety professionals. Such a good job in fact, that they inspired the elephant subtitle. They put the data in books and pamphlets. They mail the stuff to you. They send you emails. They've even load the information into PowerPoint to make it easy to present. In other words, the NSC is doing its part to make it harder to "ignore the elephant in the living room."

So, how much does the elephant cost? According to the NSC, the average cost per American of an off the job injury is $2,000 per year, or $5,100 per household. Multiply that by 300,000 people and it's $600 billion a year.

Direct & Indirect Costs

Who pays for all of this? Not all of the costs are borne by companies. The NSC calculates the direct costs of off the job injuries to be $750 per employee, per year. For a company with 10,000 employees, this translates into annual direct costs of $7.5 million.

However, most companies also cover the costs incurred by the injured employee's dependents. At $5,100 per family, things really start to add up. Granted, not every injured employee has dependents. So a conservative estimate of double the direct costs (2 x $750.00) or $1,500.00 per employee, now means $15,120,000 - just to pay for the direct costs of off the job injuries.

It's common knowledge that for workplace injuries, indirect costs are equal to or greater than direct costs. Is the same true of off the job injuries? How long would you stay away from work if you broke your leg - especially when nobody is calling you to see when you can come back like they would if it was a lost-time accident at work? How many days would you have to stay home with a child who broke a leg? What about the people who get hurt seriously and can't come back for months or maybe not ever?

Consider the case of a western area salesman/territory manager for a printing inks company. He fell off of a six-foot ladder painting the window shutters on his house. He blew a few disks in his lower back and was off work for six months. His company was just getting by - as opposed to being in the red - but without those western sales... it slipped into bankruptcy.

Conclusion

Calculating the cost of this off the job injury to the company, in this case, is easy. It cost them the ball game (or the net worth of the company before the injury). Calculating the cost for other off the job injuries isn't usually so easy - although it can be done with a little help from HR. However, the direct costs alone are usually staggering enough that they don't need to be multiplied by two or three or some other coefficient in order for you to make your point. $15,000,000 in costs translates to at least $150,000,000 in sales revenue, and anything over $100,000,000 is likely going to be enough to get your CFO's attention.

Next week, in Part 2, we'll look at how to manage the costs of off the job injuries.

SAFETY TRENDS

The Year of the Recall

By Glenn Demby

Govt. inspectors can't police all food and product imports

The year still has about eight weeks to run. But whatever happens in November and December, 2007 is bound to be remembered as the year of the product recall. So far, there have been 472 product recalls, including 20 million toys and 30 million pounds of ground beef.

Why So Many Recalls?

The nonprofit organization, Consumers Union suggests that the problem lies in the growth in imports and the corresponding breakdown of the current consumer products regulatory system. Stated simply, the volume of imports is outstripping regulatory capacity.

"In recent years, imports have skyrocketed, especially from China. The value of all imports increased by 67% between 2000 and 2006, and today 80% of all toys sold in the United States are imported from China," Consumers Union explains. 13% of the food we eat is imported, including 83% of seafood.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) weren't configured to meet the challenges of globalization. "The CPSC has half the number of employees it had about 30 years ago, and only 15 inspectors to police the millions of toys and products coming into the country at hundreds of entry points." The FDA's regulatory capacity isn't much more robust, inspecting less than one percent of all food imports entering the country.

In the past, the CPSC and FDA have been able to overcome their lack of resources by relying on industry to police itself. But in a world where more and more products are coming from beyond U.S. borders, self-policing is becoming less viable as a regulatory strategy.

The 2007 Recall Calendar

To drive home the seriousness of the problem, Consumers Union has created a month by month list of notable food and product recalls of 2007, through October:

JANUARY

Products:

Food:

FEBRUARY

Products:

Food:

MARCH

Products:

Food:

APRIL

Products:

Food:

MAY

Products:

Food:

JUNE

Products:

Food:

JULY

Products:

Food:

AUGUST

Products:

Food:

SEPTEMBER

Products:

Food:

OCTOBER

Products:

Food:

Source: Consumers Union, "2007: Year of the Product and Food Recall," http://www.consumersunion.org/pub/core_product_safety/005078.html

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