Picture a family dinner on a Wednesday night in Taranaki. A father who left for his scaffolding job that morning doesn't come home. The phone rings at 6:47pm. That scene played out 312 times in New Zealand last year.

That's the full count of fatal workplace injuries in 2024. It's the lowest number in more than two decades, a quiet victory buried in spreadsheets that nobody's celebrating because six deaths a week still feels like failure. (Source: Stats NZ / ACC, fatal-serious-injuries)

The trend line tells a story about progress. In 2020, before COVID scrambled everything, the country recorded 59,148 injuries that year. By 2022, that figure had collapsed to just 357. Then 315 in 2023. Now 312.

But here's what those numbers mean in human terms: six families, on average, lose someone every single week. Six people who kissed their kids goodbye, grabbed their lunch, and never made it home. Six funerals. Six empty chairs at Christmas.

The data doesn't tell us who they were. It doesn't name the forestry worker in Gisborne, the roofer in Auckland, the farm hand in Southland. It can't capture the 16-year-old who'll grow up without a parent, or the partner who now sleeps on one side of the bed.

What it does tell us is that New Zealand has made genuine progress on workplace safety. The number of people dying on the job has fallen by more than half since the early 2000s. Regulations tightened. Industries got serious. Inspectors showed up more often. It worked.

But 312 is still 312. It's still a classroom full of people who went to work and didn't come back. It's still more than the entire population of some small South Island towns.

Every one of those deaths was preventable. That's not rhetoric, it's the foundational principle of workplace safety law. Falls can be prevented. Machinery can be guarded. Risks can be managed. The law says employers must eliminate or minimise hazards. When someone dies at work, it means that system failed.

The families of those 312 people don't care about trend lines. They don't care that the number used to be higher. They care that their person is gone, that the law was supposed to protect them, and that it didn't.

New Zealand has proven it can make workplaces safer. The question is whether we're satisfied with 312, or whether we believe we can get that number lower still. Because every single one of those deaths represents a family that will never be whole again. Six of them, every week, all year long.