• Unemployment
• Employment
• Median hourly earnings
• Workplace injury claims
• Satisfaction with work-life balance

Workplace injury claims

Relevance

Safety at work is an important contributor to wellbeing and the risk of work-related accidents or illness can be seen as one component of the quality of work. The best currently available measure of the incidence of workplace injuries comes from the database of claims made to the ACC.

Current level and trends

Provisional data for the 2003 calendar year shows that 247,500 work-related injury claims had been reported to the ACC by 31 March 2004, an increase of 10,500 (4 percent) on the year ended December 2002 with a similar reporting cut-off. This represents a rate of 146 claims per 1,000 full-time equivalent employees (FTEs), about the same as the previous year (a rate of 143 per 1,000 FTEs). The majority of claims were for medical treatment only (ie not including weekly compensation). Eighty-two percent of claims were in respect of employees, and people who employed others in their own business. The remainder were the self-employed who did not employ others in their business. The incidence rate for the self-employed not employing others was almost twice that of the rest of the workforce, as defined above (233 per 1,000 FTEs compared with 134 per 1,000 FTEs).

Information on workplace injuries for 2003 is produced by Statistics New Zealand and output was based, for the first time, on a calendar year rather than a financial year. These figures have been backdated to 2001 but are not directly comparable with previous figures on workplace injuries.

Figure PW4.1 Estimated claim rate per 1,000 FTE employed, by age and sex, 2003

Source: Statistics New Zealand (2004d)

Injury claims for the year ending December 2003, that had been reported by March 2004, included 87 work-related fatalities. This is likely to be an underestimate of the final number of fatalities, because some deaths may have occurred subsequently from injuries in that period, and not all fatal work-related accidents result in a claim to ACC. Construction accounted for 23 percent of work-related fatalities, followed by agriculture (13 percent) and manufacturing (11 percent).

Age and sex differences

Males are more than twice as likely as females to suffer workplace injuries involving a claim to ACC (186 per 1,000 FTEs for males compared with 91 per 1,000 FTEs for females). This reflects in part a male predominance in relatively dangerous occupations. Among males, the highest injury claim rate was for those aged 65 and over followed by those aged under 25. Among females, age differences in the injury claim rate were less pronounced.

Ethnic differences

Workplace injury claim rates are higher for Māori (190 per 1,000 FTEs) than for other ethnic groups. This is likely to reflect the fact that Māori are disproportionately employed in industries and occupations that have high injury rates, such as forestry. In 2003, the next highest rate was that for Pacific peoples (157 per 1,000 FTEs), followed by Europeans (134 per 1,000 FTEs). The "Other" (including Asian) ethnic group has the lowest accident claim rate (112 per 1,000 FTEs).

Table PW4.1 New workplace injury claims, by ethnicity, 2003

Source: Statistics New Zealand (2004b)

Regional differences

The highest incidence rates occurred in Gisborne-Hawke’s Bay and Northland, with rates of 203 and 202 claims per 1,000 FTEs, respectively. Wellington had the lowest rate of 82 claims per 1,000 FTEs. These figures reflect the main occupations in these regions.

Industry differences

The variation in injury rates for different industries underlies many of the differences in injury rates for males and females, and ethnic and age groups. The highest injury rates are in hunting and fishing (257 per 1,000 FTEs), mining (235 per 1,000 FTEs), agriculture (197 per 1,000 FTEs) and manufacturing (196 per 1,000 FTEs).

Table PW4.2 New workplace injury claims, by industry, 2003

Source: Statistics New Zealand (2004d)