Full text on my Substack: https://healthyworkcounseling.substack.com/p/388000-american-workers-died-of-work
New piece I wrote trying to calculate the actual number of worker deaths in America annually. It's bad. Math isn't fun, the teachers lies to us.
Quotes:
“A lot of people die as a result of their relationship with work, and this number exploded since COVID. In finding this number, I’m offering the metric of Total Work Related Deaths, equated as follows:
Total Work Related Deaths = A (Goh Deaths aka stress/job loss/insurance loss deaths) + B (Deaths from work related accidents and events) + C (Deaths of Despair * (% of employed))
As COVID has exploded so has this number: So in total, to estimate 3 years of the Total Work Related Deaths from available data:
2019: A (160,000 estd) + B (5,333) + C (156,242 * (60% at 3.5% UE)) = 259,078 Total Work Related Deaths in 2019;
2020: A (180,000 estd) + B (4,764) + C (186,763 * (53% at ~10% UE) = 283,748 Total Work Related Deaths in 2020
2021: A (200,000 estd) + B (5,190) + C (209,225 * (59.5% at 4% UE) = 388,575 Total Work Related Deaths in 2021
So according to these metrics, with 166M workers in America, each year around 0.25% of the American Labor Force dies with the cause being directly related to participating in the Labor Force. The rate of labor force improvement is typically around 0.07%. Over three times more workers are dying from their jobs than are joining the labor force.”
“One limitation here is that the Goh numbers are not actively being tracked, which is an important metric that was presented in 2016 and has not been utilized or standardized since. I think this highlights a massive need for further research and collection of labor metrics on the topics of work related deaths.
However I want to point out that according to many other data projections related to the COVID crisis, the numbers presented here for our Goh number projection are likely severely under-estimated; it is likely that the Goh numbers in 2020 and 2021 are 300-400k, possibly even over 500k or more.”
” There’s a few studies that support this model I’m presenting: last year a paper came from Barcelona on the subject. Beseran et al 2022 identifies that unemployment, precarious employment, and job security related anxiety are all contributing factors to the statistic of deaths of despair. They cite decades of research in America and across the world. This study also does a good job fighting the stereotype that deaths of addiction or suicide are related to low class or unemployment, in fact it finds:
Interestingly, some studies suggest that high-status jobs also have increased despair-related mortality. For instance, health professionals exhibit the highest drug mortality risk, which is only partially attributable to easy occupational access to opioids”