I did
an interesting the other night. I was again looking at workplace death rates
stats (as I have been for sometime), and was staring at the national fatality
rate between, 2003 to 2013. Something was not right as I know stats do not
always show the truth, why was it going down. I was in a critical thinking
state of mind and was trying to work out another reason why rate was trending
down (which looks real good). Readers of mine know that I also think that this
rate is going down for other reasons, such as better plant and equipment design
and more officer ownership of safety. But there had to be more to it.
I
thought, what did the unemployment line look like. So I got onto a site showing
the employment rate and punched into the graph the dates between 2003 and 2013.
I then copied these and placed them next to each other and then looked at them
to see if there was any relationship there. At first I could not see anything, but
always thinking outside the box, I flipped one graph upside down. There it was;
a somewhat similar trending line that when superimposed over the other matched
very close the other trending line. What I have observed is that the
unemployment rate seems to have a similar line to the death rate. What does
this mean? We’ll just on this one point, we cannot look at our death rate and
advertise to naive people that safety must be working, that there are other
influences that can make a difference to outcomes on graphs. The government is
not going to say that workplace death rates are down because unemployment if up
are they! I wonder if suicide rates can be related to unemployment, I know they
do, I have already looked.
And people call me too passionate and to critical to dam right (you can see why business don't want to employ such high drive and passion for safety – don’t use my research for your own gain!