A construction worker in Auckland. A farmer in Southland. A truck driver somewhere between Christchurch and Dunedin. Last year, 312 workers died doing their jobs in New Zealand. That's one fatal workplace injury every 28 hours. (Source: Stats NZ / ACC, fatal-serious-injuries)

While Tower Insurance reports surging weather-related claims that will nearly halve their profits, and Parliament debates racism allegations, there's a quieter crisis the numbers reveal: we've stopped making progress on keeping workers alive.

In 2023, 315 workers died. In 2024, it was 312. The year before that, 357. These aren't improving trends. These are flat lines on a graph that should be plummeting.

Here's what makes this particularly stark: before 2022, the data tracked something different. Total injury claims hovered around 60,000 annually. Then the methodology changed to focus specifically on fatal and serious injuries. That shift in 2022 revealed 357 workplace deaths. Three years later, we've barely budged from that number.

Three hundred and twelve families got a phone call last year they'll never forget. Three hundred and twelve people went to work and didn't come home. That's more than the population of some small South Island towns.

Put another way: if you worked every single day in 2024, a New Zealand worker died on the job roughly every 28 hours of your working life. Before you finished your Monday shift and came back Wednesday morning, someone else's shift ended permanently.

We don't know from this data which industries are killing workers, or which regions are most dangerous, or whether these deaths were preventable. What we do know is the total. And the total isn't moving in the right direction fast enough.

For context, New Zealand's workforce is roughly 2.9 million people. That means about one in every 9,300 workers died on the job last year. Your office building, your factory floor, your construction site: somewhere in New Zealand, in a workplace just like yours, someone didn't make it home.

The data doesn't tell us their names. It doesn't tell us if they were 22 or 62, whether they'd been in the job two weeks or twenty years, whether they left behind kids or grandkids. It just gives us the number: 312.

And next year, unless something fundamental changes, that number will likely be around 312 again. That's not a statistic. That's a policy failure wearing the clothes of normal business operations.