Guide to Reporting out the Data

Terms

• Sites, or establishments, are a company’s individual physical locations.
• Companies are comprised of one or more sites.
• For companies, we grouped sites with the same company name and/or employer identification number. Those company groupings may not include all subsidiaries.
• Each site is labeled with an industry code, reported by its parent company, representing the main type of work performed at that location. The Labor Department asks companies to use the 2012 North American Industry Classification System, or NAICS, to classify sites.
• Companies, therefore, often include multiple sites with different industry codes. We calculated the injury rates for each cluster of sites associated with a particular industry, so that it can be compared to the national industry rates, instead of calculating one overall injury rate for each company.

Injuries and Illnesses

• Companies are required to record and report any work-related injury or illness that requires either:
  1. days away from work,
  2. a job restriction or transfer, such as light duty,
  3. medical treatment beyond first aid, including prescription medications and physical therapy.
• Injuries that result in a loss of consciousness must also be recorded.
• We calculated both the total injury and illness rate (all three categories) as well as the serious injury and illness rate (also called the DART rate, because it includes Days Away injuries and Restrictions/Transfer injuries). These are considered more serious injuries because they require time off to recover or job changes.
• Injury rates are calculated by multiplying the number of injuries by 200,000 and dividing by the number of work hours, per guidance from the U.S. Department of Labor. The result is the rate of injuries per 100 full-time workers, because 200,000 work hours is the equivalent of 100 full-time employees. Keep in mind that it is the rate of injuries, not injured workers, and that employees may have more than one injury during the year.
• If an establishment has a low number of work hours, a small number of injuries can have an outsized effect on the rate. For this reason, we have not calculated the injury rates of worksites with fewer than 200,000 hours, though they may still merit scrutiny. If you want to calculate those rates, follow the government’s formula or use its online calculator.

Reporting

• Companies and establishments may have similar names but may be different entities.
• The highest injury rates do not necessarily designate the “most dangerous” workplaces. Some companies systematically underreport injuries or pressure workers to avoid getting treatment, so a low injury rate may be misleading and a high one may still be an undercount. A workplace could have low injury rates but multiple deaths. And some companies fail to report at all. Avoid making any sweeping conclusions based on this data alone.
• Not all companies are reflected here. Only worksites with 250 or more employees – or those in high-risk industries with 20 or more employees – are required to report injury data.
• Always try to get a response from any employer whose injury rate you want to highlight.
• This data is reported by employers to the U.S. Department of Labor, so the accuracy of the injury numbers, industry classifications, addresses, and names relies on the employers who submit it.
• To dig deeper into a particular workplace, reporters may want to get the OSHA 300 logs, which include the names of injured workers as well as the date and type of each injury. Employers must provide the logs to any current or former worker who requests them, and there are no restrictions on workers sharing those records with reporters.

COVID-19

COVID-19 may affect injury numbers. OSHA directed employers to count work-related COVID-19 cases, but employers didn’t apply that directive consistently. The pandemic may have also impacted workplace practices and injury reporting.

Sources

• The injury data comes from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration as reported by businesses. Reveal sued the government to make this data public.
• Average industry rates by industry come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Employers

If you are an employer and have additional information about your data, email injurytracker@revealnews.org.