Combining Fatal and Nonfatal Workplace Injury Data to Characterize Industrial Risk Profiles

Workplace injury data published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Safety and Health Statistics (BLS-OSHS) office are among the most comprehensive measures of on-the-job risk facing American workers.  These data include fatal incidents from the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI) as well as nonfatal incidents from the Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses (SOII).  Both sources communicate important measures of the risk profile for workplaces by industry. However, scope differences of workers covered by CFOI and SOII make direct comparability of rates and counts of fatal and nonfatal data problematic.  Joint consideration of such statistics requires that both sources reflect the same universe of workers; such modification must be made at the microdata level and re-calculated on a common basis.  A synthesis like this has never been done at the microdata level and this will be the first study that can report a combined fatal and nonfatal measure of an industry’s risk profile. As BLS economists with direct access to the OSHS microdata and methodology specifications for both sources, we have calibrated CFOI and SOII data for the years 2003-2011 to cover the same universe.  Thus, the re-computed fatal and nonfatal rates using a shared covered employment base describes the experience of the same workers in fatal and nonfatal terms.  Normalizing these rates as relative risk measures, we have developed a visual method of graphing the industry risk profile in two-dimensional space to characterize each industry.  We hope to extend this to other dimensions such as occuaption and demographics.