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Although this article doesn't mention messengers it highlights the inherent
danger of the messenger's workplace.
The messenger industry should note the last line - "employers have to ensure
that safety standards are not eroded by financial pressures."
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Safety: Greatest Worker Peril: The Road
New York Times, April 13, 2004
By John O'Neil
Driving is the most dangerous thing American workers do on the job, according
to a study by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Over all, workplace deaths fell over the last decade, but work-related driving
fatalities increased, accounting for 22 percent of all worker deaths, the
analysis found.
Almost 90 percent of the driving deaths involved men, whose fatality rate
was six times as high as that of women.
The dangers also increased with age: workers from 55 to 64 were 50 percent
more likely to be killed in crashes, and the death rate for drivers over 65
was more than four times as great as the average for all workers.
Trucks were particularly dangerous, and not just to their drivers. From
1992 to 2001, an average of 681 drivers of large trucks were killed each
year, but collisions with large trucks killed 4,425 occupants of other vehicles,
according to the analysis, published April 1 in the agency's Morbidity and
Mortality Weekly Report.
The drivers killed in work-related crashes had a mixed record on some safety
measures: 8 percent were determined to have been drinking and 72 percent were
not wearing seat belts.
The study's author, Stephanie Pratt, an epidemiologist with the National
Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, said that time pressure, fatigue
and travel in unfamiliar areas or in unfamiliar vehicles could make work-related
driving especially dangerous.
She recommends that workers who drive on the job think about safety just
as if they were working on a factory floor.
Employers have to ensure that safety standards are not eroded by financial
pressures, Ms. Pratt said.
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