Why did serious injuries to young Kiwi workers suddenly drop by more than half in 2022, and why have they stayed down?

The numbers are stark. In 2021, 40,086 workers under 30 suffered serious injuries on the job. The next year? Just 17,055. That's a 57% drop in twelve months. (Source: Stats NZ / ACC, fatal-serious-injuries)

Two years later, in 2024, the number sits at 15,957. It hasn't climbed back. Whatever changed in 2022, it stuck.

This isn't a gradual improvement story. For two decades, the numbers bounced around the 35,000-45,000 range with predictable regularity. Then 2022 arrived and cut the figure in half overnight. You don't see drops like this in workplace injury data without something fundamental changing.

The obvious suspect: fewer young people working. But that only explains part of it. Yes, some left for Australia. Yes, COVID changed work patterns. But the injury rate. not just the raw numbers. has stayed suppressed for three years now. If young workers were simply returning to the same jobs in the same numbers, we'd see the injuries climb back too.

So what else could be driving this? Perhaps the nature of work shifted. The pandemic accelerated the move away from physical labour toward service and digital roles. Fewer young people stacking shelves at 2am or operating machinery might mean fewer chances to get hurt. Or maybe the high-risk industries that traditionally employed young workers. hospitality, construction labour, retail warehousing. simply hired fewer people and never bounced back.

There's another possibility: better safety practices finally took hold. Two decades of ACC levies and workplace safety campaigns might have reached critical mass precisely when the workforce composition was already shifting. The timing could be coincidence meeting intention.

What we know for certain: 24,129 fewer young workers suffered serious injuries in 2024 than in 2021. That's 24,000 people who didn't break bones, didn't tear ligaments, didn't need surgery or months off work. That's 24,000 families who didn't get a call from a hospital.

The data doesn't tell us whether this is a triumph of safety culture, a side effect of economic restructuring, or simply young Kiwis abandoning industries that were breaking their bodies. It just shows us the cliff edge: before 2022, and after.

What changed? The numbers can't say. But something did, and it's still changing now.