The New Year is upon us and the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics has released an annual report regarding fatal work injuries for previous years in Georgia (note that the 2015 stats will come out at the end of this year, so all of this information is based on year 2014). The Georgia State Board of Workers’ Compensation also released their reports regarding claims and benefits paid during 2015. As Atlanta, GA’s workers compensation attorney, I want to break the numbers down and help explain them.
Let’s take a look, and further examine what this information means for us.
Fatal Work Injuries
Thanks to the work of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), fatal work injuries are down overall as compared to the numbers from decades past. However, they are still far from zero, and are even increasing as compared with more recent years, which means that there’s a copious amount of work to be done if deaths in the workplace are going to decrease again. Here are the hard numbers:
Totals
Total fatal work injuries in GA, 2014: 148
Compared to the stats for 2013: 117
Increased/decreased by: +31 total deaths
Top Causes of death in GA
Transportation incidents: 59
Violence by person/animal: 32
Falls/trips/slips: 30
This information clearly shows that while deaths are way down from the 1990s, they’re actually increasing overall. 2009 boasted the lowest numbers in recent years, and then went up slightly in 2010. Between then and 2014, death tolls plateaued (plus or minus a few), with 2014 standing at the peak within that timeframe. While a virtual plateau is better than, say, an exponential increase, they shouldn’t be tolerated, and show stagnancy in the effort to get those numbers down to zero.
No one wants to talk about this, but in the tragic event that you lose a family member or spouse to a work incident, you could be entitled to indemnity benefits. If such a case occurs, it’ll make sense to work with a workers comp attorney around Atlanta, because they’ll be able to cover the issues that’ll be on the back burner while you focus on more important things.
2015 Non-fatal Stats
Total indemnity claims in GA, 2015: 39,899
Indemnity benefits paid out: $1,056,193,486
Medical claims: 100,317
Medical paid out: $220,084,601
Nothing proves more clearly that accidents do happen than the sheer volume of these hard numbers—that over one billion dollars was paid out in indemnity in the state of Georgia in 2015 to nearly 40,000 claimants. No one plans for an accident to happen at work, but clearly they occur frequently. In the likely chance that you become one of those many people, it is imperative that you attain every cent you’re entitled to. As Atlanta’s workers comp attorney, I’ll do my best to make sure that happens.
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