A factory worker in Hamilton. A farmer in Southland. A roofer in Wellington. Each of them left for work one morning and never came home.

Last year, 312 New Zealanders died from workplace injuries. That's almost one person every single working day. (Source: Stats NZ / ACC, fatal-serious-injuries)

The number has been eerily consistent for three years now: 357 deaths in 2022, 315 in 2023, 312 in 2024. After two decades of data showing wildly fluctuating figures, including anomalies like 59,148 recorded injuries in 2020 and 61,194 in 2021, the statistics have settled into a grim pattern.

Three hundred deaths a year. That's not a data point. That's 312 families who had to plan funerals instead of birthdays. 312 empty chairs at dinner tables. 312 people who clocked in and never clocked out.

The consistency is almost worse than a spike. A sudden jump in deaths would trigger inquiries, headlines, political pressure. But 312 deaths every year becomes background noise. It becomes acceptable. It becomes just how many people die at work in New Zealand.

This isn't like road deaths, where you can see the campaigns, the speed limits, the breath-testing stations. Workplace fatalities happen behind factory gates, on remote farms, up on scaffolding where nobody's watching. They don't make the evening news unless something spectacular goes wrong.

And here's what makes it harder to fix: we don't know who these 312 people are from this data alone. We don't know which industries are killing workers. We don't know if they're older workers in declining health or young people just starting out. We don't know if they died from falls, from machinery, from toxic exposure, or from something that could have been prevented with a $50 piece of safety equipment.

What we do know is this: for the past three years, New Zealand has accepted that roughly one person dies at work every 1.2 days. We've normalised it. The number doesn't shock us anymore.

Every one of those 312 deaths was preventable. Someone decided a safety measure was too expensive, or too time-consuming, or unnecessary. Someone didn't do a hazard assessment. Someone cut a corner. Someone sent a worker into a situation they shouldn't have been in.

And now, 312 families are living with the consequences.

The data doesn't tell us their names. It doesn't tell us their stories. But it tells us this: we've built a country where more than 300 people dying at work every year has become routine. Where we track the number, publish it, and move on.

That should horrify us. Instead, it barely registers.