Death and Work in Britain

Official figures indicate that there were 302 fatal occupational injuries in Britain 1996/97. This paper is a sustained critique of the means by which this 'headline figure' is reached. Drawing upon other, more or less recoverable, officially collected data on fatal injuries it demonstrates that there are at least five times more fatal occupational injuries during this time period. It then considers various anomalies and inconsistencies within the legally constituted (and recently revised) categories of data collection, the effect of which is to exclude indeterminate numbers of occupational fatalities, not least to members of the public, to the self-employed, and to other groups of workers. Finally, the paper considers some social processes of under-reporting, whereby occupational fatalities are not recorded in official data. The paper concludes that: fatal injury data is grossly incomplete, and requires work of reconstruction; the actual number of fatalities incurred through work in Britain at the end of the 1990s represents a largely obscured social problem; while there remain questions about both the reliability and validity of official fatality data, it is important that this data is incorporated within sociological analysis, albeit sceptically.