Most employees feel prepared to protect themselves and their colleagues in the event of an emergency.
But for safety advocates, the results of a recent survey by the National Safety Council suggest there remain plenty of workplaces throughout the country where safety is not the priority it should be.
The poll of 2,000 U.S. employees was conducted in May. It included 600 respondents who described themselves as supervisors or managers.
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Three-quarters of managers and supervisors say their employees have the necessary training to respond to an emergency. But only 61 percent of employees say the same thing about themselves.
Perhaps some managers are underestimating the number of employees who weren't paying attention during safety training. Or maybe the employees just don't believe the training they received was that good.
Most respondents did not believe that "safety takes a backseat to completing job tasks," but managers (38 percent) were more likely to say that was the case than employees (27 percent).
Supervisors (34 percent) were also more likely to say that workers are afraid to report safety issues than employees (25 percent).
The report on emergency situations refers largely to extreme weather events, such as tornadoes or hurricanes, but includes man-made emergencies, such as workplace shootings. Even in the absence of headline-grabbing mass shootings, hundreds of Americans are murdered at work every year. Roughly 9 percent of workplace deaths in 2013 were due to homicide — or 397 in total.
A dozen workers die on the job every day in the United States, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. That is a dramatic improvement from 1970, when the agency was first started and an average of 38 workers died a day.
Construction is the leading sector for work-related fatalities, accounting for a fifth of all deaths on the job. In 2014, 899 of the 4,386 work fatalities came at construction sites.
Falls are by far the leading cause of job-related deaths, and they are a major killer in construction. Forty percent of construction fatalities were due to falls in 2014, followed by electrocutions (8 percent), struck by object (8 percent) and "caught/in-between" (4 percent), a category that refers to workers who are crushed or trapped by collapsing equipment or material.
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