Everyone knows workplaces are dangerous. What they don't know is that New Zealand just pulled off one of the sharpest workplace safety improvements in a generation, and nobody's talking about it.

Fatal and serious injuries among workers aged 15-29 dropped from 29,790 in 2021 to 10,848 in 2024. That's a 64% decline in three years. (Source: Stats NZ / ACC, fatal-serious-injuries)

To put that in perspective: in 2021, roughly 82 young workers were seriously injured or killed every single day. By 2024, that number had fallen to 30.

The shift happened suddenly. For two decades, the numbers held relatively steady. Between 2000 and 2020, fatal and serious injuries among young workers hovered between 24,000 and 32,000 annually. Then in 2022, they fell off a cliff.

What changed? The data doesn't explain itself, but the timeline is instructive. The pandemic reshaped how and where young people work. Hospitality jobs vanished. Construction slowed. Remote work became normal. Many high-risk industries shed their youngest workers first.

But here's the uncomfortable truth: those workers didn't just disappear. Many moved into different sectors. Some stopped working altogether. The drop in injuries might reflect fewer young people in dangerous jobs, not necessarily safer workplaces.

Still, a 64% reduction is a 64% reduction. Eighteen thousand fewer families got bad news in 2024 than in 2021. That matters, regardless of what drove the change.

The challenge now is keeping it down. As industries rebuild, as young workers flow back into construction, manufacturing, and agriculture, will the injury rate creep back up? Or have we learned something about how to protect the workers who can least afford to get hurt?

Young workers earn less, have fewer protections, and are more likely to take risks because they don't yet know what can go wrong. They're also the future of every industry in this country. If we can keep 10,000 of them out of ACC's serious injury category every year, we should probably figure out how we did it.

The data shows we made young work safer, fast. Whether by accident or design, it happened. The question is whether anyone's paying enough attention to make sure it lasts.