While Parliament argues over racism and Tower Insurance tallies its weather claims, there's a number that should be making headlines but isn't. Fatal and serious workplace injuries among workers aged 15 to 29 have plummeted from 29,790 in 2021 to just 10,848 in 2024.

That's a 63% drop in three years. On the surface, it looks like New Zealand workplaces have become dramatically safer for young people. But look closer at the 24-year trajectory and a different story emerges.

This isn't about better safety. It's about fewer young people working at all, particularly in the industries that carry risk.

The decline is too sharp, too sudden to be explained by safety improvements alone. Between 2000 and 2021, serious youth workplace injuries fluctuated but never dropped below 20,000. Then COVID hit. The number halved in 2022, down to 12,444. It kept falling: 11,601 in 2023, 10,848 in 2024. (Source: Stats NZ / ACC, fatal-serious-injuries)

What changed wasn't how we work. It's who's working.

Young people have been pushed out of the workforce in waves. First by COVID lockdowns that eliminated hospitality and retail jobs. Then by a cost of living crisis that kept them in education longer. Now by a recession that's seen youth unemployment climb while businesses cut entry-level positions first.

The construction sector, historically one of the biggest employers of young workers and one of the most dangerous, has shed thousands of jobs. Manufacturing has contracted. Forestry, another high-risk industry for young workers, has downsized. When fewer young people are in dangerous jobs, fewer young people get hurt. That's arithmetic, not progress.

Here's the test: if workplace safety had genuinely improved by 63% in three years, we'd see similar drops across all age groups. We don't. The reduction is concentrated among young workers, the demographic most likely to be doing casual, temporary, or contract work in industries hit hardest by economic contraction.

The real story in this data isn't that workplaces got safer. It's that an entire generation is being locked out of the workforce entirely, starting with the riskiest jobs that used to be their entry point. A 19-year-old who can't get hired on a building site doesn't appear in the injury statistics. They also don't get the skills, the income, or the career pathway that job would have provided.

Fewer injuries sounds like good news. But when the reason is fewer opportunities, it's just another way of counting what young New Zealanders have lost.