Use of work injury rate tables in estimating disabling work injuries.

In a recent study of the Bureau of Labor Statisticsoperated national industrial safety statistics program conducted by the authors,1 it was found that current data collected underestimates the extent of industrial accidents nationally and provides no reliable insight into the incidence rates below the federal level. Various alternative methods for estimating work injuries deserve consideration. This paper will focus attention on the use of accident rate tables for derivation of state level estimates of work injuries and fatalities. In addition, some attention will be directed towards assessing the value of work injury rate tables in developing measures of work injury incidence and relative improvement over the working lifetime of individuals. The concept of accident rate tables is not a new development. It has been used extensively in the insurance industry as a basis of developing work injury experience rates of different industries and occupations. Further, some researchers in the field of Workmen's Compensation and statistical program evaluation, notably Jaffe and Pearce,2'3 have conducted experiments in the generation and application of work injury rate tables to estimates and actual counts of the labor force by age, sex and industry to develop synthetic work injury measures. However, in both instances, the experiments were tied to the necessity of having available information on the age, sex, industry and occupational affiliation of the labor force. Information of this fine degree of demographic detail is generally unavailable at any time except for decennial Censuses. Annual estimates of the labor force by age and sex at both the national and state levels have, until recently, been virtually lacking. Data on the age and sex of both industrial fatalities and disabilities can be obtained from tallies of individual reports of accidents filed with State Accident or Workmen's Compensation systems. Therefore, the further refinement of the estimating technique has been stymied by both the lack of good demographic detail of national and state labor forces on an annual basis and untabulated data on the demographic characteristics of accident data in most states. A notable exception is the State of California, Work Injury Reporting System. For over a decade, the State of California Department of Industrial Relations, Division of Research and Statistics, has compiled and published tabulations of the age, sex distributions of both fatalities and disabling injuries. The Division has also developed, to a lesser-known extent, estimates and projections of the State Labor Force by Age and Sex. The information is generally available on a five-year bench-mark basis.4 Thus, in light of this data availability, it was decided to conduct several tests with the combined data sources in California as an' experiment in the refined application of the accident rate table concept of work injury estimation.