ABSTRACT
In contemporary societies, work routinely kills workers and members of the public through acute injury and chronic illness. The scale of this routine killing — deaths occur across all industries, all types of companies — is almost incomprehensible. Although the focus of this text is upon safety, so that we are concerned here with deaths from acute incidents, a useful context for our considerations in this chapter is the International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimate that, at a bare minimum, 2.2 million workers die each year through work-related ‘accidents’ and diseases (International Labour Organisation 2005: 1). This means that annually there are more than 5,000 work-related deaths every day, while for every fatality there are another 500–2,000 injuries, depending on the type of job.
