Preventing workplace deaths, injuries, illnesses and diseases protects workers. Ensuring workers’ health and safety also benefits their employers and communities.

Worksafe’s just-released report, Prevention pays: Solutions to help workers and businesses thrive makes the links visible.

It tallies the costs – human, financial and social – of failures to protect workers’ health and safety on the job. It profiles innovative solutions from different sectors, and offers a range of common-sense recommendations to keep workers healthy and safe, help employers succeed and support the communities depending on them both. The focus is on California, where the health and safety advocacy organization is based. The stories and arguments for prevention transcend geography.

Prevention is not about “controlling” a hazard, so it’s still there. Prevention means avoiding harm. It’s the public health goal of the most effective solutions – ones that protect the most people by preventing or eliminating hazards. The triangle (below) summarizes these principles.

In workplaces, much time is spent debating if something “must” be done, rather than using the evidence that prevention pays. As the report says:

"It’s time to shift from a focus on “the problem” and how bad it is, to a prevention framework that emphasizes solutions and “fixing” problems. It’s time to make the goal clearer by using the word “prevention” instead of “controls.” It’s time to use the word “health” along with “safety.” It’s time to make the rewards of prevention more consistent, wide-ranging, and initiated by more employers and workers."

Critics often say that health and safety reforms hurt employers.  Prevention pays demonstrates that the exact opposite is true. As one source says:

In California, the costs are at least 1.4 percent of the approximately $1.82 trillion in the state gross product for 2009. The report uses available data to show:

·       The 6,632 work-related fatalities reported in [the state] between 1992 and 2002 cost $5.4 billion alone, in direct and indirect costs. Those are just immediate injuries that led to death. The costs of occupational disease, injuries, and illnesses – which shorten and change lives – are estimated to be at least $20.7 billion a year.

·       More recently, almost two million workers in the state are injured and made ill every year.

·       Death claimed nearly 8,000 more workers a year—7,079 from illnesses and 660 from injuries (illness work-related deaths include lung and heart diseases, cancers, etc.).

·       The combination of occupational injuries and diseases costs California at least $20.7 billion each year in lost wages and productivity, health care, administrative, and other costs.

·       This includes almost $294 million that it costs employers to restaff, train and deal with other disruptions.

The numbers are impressive and sobering. Some employers already recognize the hazards behind them. With workers, their unions and other advocates, businesses in a variety of sectors have improved how their workplaces function. For example, they have:

·       made ergonomic improvements that increase productivity while saving money and avoiding harm to workers;

·       eliminated toxic chemicals and therefore the expenses for protective gear and pollution control equipment; and

·       used research to practice (R2P) processes to identity hazardous work and develop alternative methods and tools.

The over-arching conclusion is hard to miss. As the director of Corporate Health Solutions for Methodist Hospitals in Gary and Merrillville, Indiana noted,

"It is better to put a fence at the top of a cliff than an ambulance at the bottom. Companies are so bottom-line driven, prevention can be a hard sell, but it is always a better solution."

This is true for the workers whose lives, bodies and livelihoods are on the line. It’s just as true for the companies who employ them, and the communities counting on both.