Truck driver among most dangerous occupations

Workplace fatalities went down recently for truck drivers, but in the long term, more truckers are dying while working despite so-called safety regulations enacted over the years.

That’s according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries report, which breaks down the number of workplace fatalities for 2023. As in previous years, truck drivers and other transportation workers rank among the highest in fatalities of all private sector employees.

Workplace fatalities claimed the lives of 823 heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers in 2023. That was down significantly, by 12%, compared to the previous year. It also marked the fewest workplace deaths among truckers since 2016, when 786 truck drivers died on the job.

The vast majority of those deaths were transportation incidents. Only 7% of fatalities were the result of contact incidents, with 6% caused by exposure to harmful substances/environments.

Although workplace fatalities among truck drivers are the lowest in several years, they are still up over a 10-year period. Compared to 2013, the number of truckers who have died while on the job has increased by 16%.

In fact, since the Bureau of Labor Statistics first started publishing the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries in 1992, truck driver deaths have trended upward. In 1992, 700 truckers died. There have been three significant year-to-year decreases since then: an 11% drop in 2003, a 28% decrease in 2009 and the latest 12% decline.

Perhaps not coincidentally, all of those decreases were immediately preceded by an economic recession.

There appears to be no correlation between lower trucker workplace fatalities and significant safety regulations, including the 2017 ELD mandate and hours-of-service changes in 2003 and 2013.

When drilling down to specific occupations, more truck drivers died while working than did workers in any other job. In a distant second, there were 318 workplace fatalities among construction laborers.

Zooming out, driver/sales workers and truck drivers accounted for the most workplace fatalities by civilian occupations, with nearly 1,000 deaths, followed by grounds maintenance workers (226) and miscellaneous agricultural workers (146). Per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers, the truck driver fatality rate of 26.8 ranked seventh. Leading occupations in fatality rates were logging workers (98.9), fishing and hunting workers (86.9) and roofers (51.8).

More broadly, workers in transportation and material-moving occupations represented the occupational group with the most workplace fatalities, with nearly 1,500 deaths. Fatalities in that group dropped nearly 8% from 2022, largely the result of the 12% decrease among truck drivers.

Transportation and material-moving workers also experienced the second-highest fatality rate per 100,000 workers, at 13.6. Farming, fishing and forestry occupations’ workplace fatality rate of 24.4 was the highest.

By sector, transportation and warehousing had the second-most total workplace fatalities, at 930 deaths – down 12% from 2022. The construction sector’s 1,075 fatalities were the most in the private sector.

Across all sectors and occupations, transportation incidents were the most common type of fatal event, accounting for more than a third of all workplace fatalities. Those incidents made up 72% of fatalities within the transportation and warehousing sector. Among those, two-thirds were roadway collisions, and nearly half occurred on an interstate, freeway or expressway.

In 2023, a worker died every 99 minutes from a work-related injury. Overall, workplace fatalities in the private sector went down 4% in 2023 to nearly 5,300 deaths. LL