And for the past five years, the rates for your industry have dropped below rates for manufacturing. That's good news-I encourage you to keep up the good work. Now I'd like to see us make a real dent in the fatality rates. The news on fatalities has not been good. In fact, it's terrible.
More construction workers die on the job than workers in any other field.
Only 6 percent of Americans work in construction, but nearly 20 percent of American workers who lost their lives in the workplace last year died on construction sites. More than 1200 construction workers were killed in 1998-a 6 percent increase from 1997. At the same time, overall workplace fatalities across the U.S. declined 3 percent. While occupational deaths have been declining in most other industries, deaths on construction sites have been increasing-by 25 percent over the past seven years. Clearly, those numbers are headed in the wrong direction, and we must do something about it.