Construction Trend Tuesday (#11)

How dangerous is construction work?

Construction Trend Tuesday covers one (hopefully) interesting industry trend in a quick, two minute read. You can access the archive of CTT posts here. If you’d like to sponsor CTT posts, just respond to this email or drop us a comment.

Construction accounted for more than one in five fatal occupational injuries in 2023, making it the third most dangerous industry (logging, it should be noted, is obscenely dangerous—do not do logging).

That said, construction work has become considerably safer over time. In 1992, there were 13.1 fatal injuries per 100,000 construction workers. That rate has fallen to the low-to-mid 9s in recent years, a decline of roughly 27%.

Despite this longer-term improvement, progress has stalled over the past decade or so, with the fatal injury rate roughly unchanged since 2010.

I don’t have any particularly compelling explanations for the recent lack of improvement. As much time as I spend with construction data, I’m far less knowledgeable about what happens on the ground (or roof, or scaffolding, etc.).

One potential explanation: some construction occupations are far more dangerous than others, and the kind of construction being done at any given time can radically alter what occupations are required.

For instance, we’re currently building about 3x more housing than we were in 2010, and roofer is by far most dangerous construction occupation. Not a huge surprise—roughly 40% of industrywide fatalities are the result of falls. So it’s possible that construction work has become safer, but because we’re using so many more roofers, the overall fatal injury rate has held steady.

More plausibly, the stagnation in safety improvements is due to a lack of new innovations and other cultural/policy factors.

As a final longshot explanation: there’s the theory of risk compensation, the idea that safety improvements can paradoxically lead people to take more risks. The introduction of seatbelts in the 1970s reduced the risk per car accident but led to riskier driving and, ultimately, more traffic fatalities. Similarly, putting ankle leashes on surfboards emboldened surfers to take on bigger waves, increasing the rate of surfing deaths.

So maybe roofers take more risks with better harnesses/safety equipment, and that keeps the fatal injury rate constant despite innovations? I can’t find any evidence to suggest that risk compensation explains the industry’s recent lack of improvement, so it’s not a particularly compelling answer.

As always, let us know if you have any insights on why industrywide safety hasn’t improved over the past decade.

What’s Next

We get quite a bit of new economic data this week, including the Fed’s favorite measure of inflation. We’ll go over that and a whole lot more in Week in Review, our every-Friday post that covers all the economic news and data in a breezy, five minute read.

Week in Review is only for paying subscribers. If that’s not you and you want it to be, just click the subscribe button.