NEWS from one hundred years ago: KILLED BY WORK

The death of a workman is reported in Otago newspapers today. Joseph Durham, a tiler, fell from a scaffold onto a concrete floor in a dairy factory at Henley. A fellow worker ‘heard a sharp cry, turned immediately’ and saw Joseph falling. ‘The fall was a very heavy one.’ After falling, Joseph lay on the floor ‘with blood oozing from mouth and nose.’ He was in his early thirties, single, and a returned soldier. Deaths caused by unsafe work are very common everywhere in New Zealand. Although official statistics do not show exactly how many ‘accidental’ deaths among working people are caused by slipshod employers, they clearly number more than one hundred every year. Factory work, although a lot safer today than in the nineteenth century, thanks to stricter control by the state, can be dangerous. Forestry, mining, quarrying, wharf work, ship work, farm work and work on roads and railways are all serious killers. Men are the ones killed by work, mostly. A total of 193 men and 27 women are killed this year by accidents in mines and quarries, by cutting or piercing instruments, by falls, by crushing and by machinery. Are these workmen’s deaths the most numerous avoidable deaths, after war deaths, in our population during these early decades of the twentieth century?

Otago Daily Times, 03 November 1920
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‘Deaths from violence,’ https://www3.stats.govt.nz/New_Zealand_Official_Yearbooks/1921-22/NZOYB_1921-22.html#idsect2_1_41318