OCR Text |
Show Occupational Accidents Reap Big Toll Each Year In Nation By VERNON WORTHEN If one should pause for a few moments and try and count the number of occupational accidents that occur each year in their community com-munity or in the country it would be hard to remember very many. In the United States during the year 1941, eighteen thousand workers were killed by occupational occupa-tional accidents. An additional 29 workers were killed while off the job. This loss of manpower represented rep-resented labor sufficient to build 20 battleships, 200 destroyers and 7,000 heavy bombers. Manpower Loss In 4 Weeks In the United States 24,000,000 man days of work were lost because be-cause of illness in four weeks, (Nov.. 24 to Dec. 20, 1941), of which 3,200,000 man days were lost in war production industries, equivalent to the time required to build two heavy cruisers or 448 medium bombers or 3,200 light tanks. Accident toll among men in the expanded selective service age bracket (20 to 45) was 26,000 equal to the destruction of almost two full Army divisions. In the occupational field, men cue msuuciea to oe careful, but too often men are careless about things because they say they can do the job while they are making things safe to work on. Carelessness Careless-ness causes the greater percentage of our accidents. Stop and ask the next 5 persons per-sons you see who have had ,an accident and see the percentage caused from carelessness. " The state compensation law helps the injured person to have some income while off the job, but it is usually small in comparison com-parison with what might be made if he was at his regular vocation. People handling livestock have more accidents caused because of show-off activity than from any other cause, such as rodeos, racing, rac-ing, etc. |