While Timaru deals with a dog attack and food safety officials recall salami products, there's a safety story nobody's talking about: New Zealand's workplaces just became dramatically safer for workers in their late fifties.

In 2020, 10,350 workers aged 55-59 suffered fatal or serious injuries at work. By 2024, that number had fallen to 4,734. That's a 54% drop in four years. (Source: Stats NZ / ACC, fatal-serious-injuries)

This isn't a gradual improvement. It's a collapse in serious workplace injuries for this specific age group, and it happened faster than anyone anticipated.

Go back to 2002, when the data series began. That year, 4,873 workers in this age bracket were seriously injured. For the next 18 years, the number climbed. It peaked in 2018 at 10,622, then stayed high through 2019 and 2020. Then COVID hit.

The pivot year was 2022. Serious injuries for 55-59 year olds fell to 4,929, less than half the 2020 figure. They kept falling: 4,908 in 2023, 4,734 in 2024. We're now back to 2002 levels, despite having hundreds of thousands more workers in this age bracket than we did 22 years ago.

What changed? The obvious answer is COVID reshaping work itself. Older workers shifted to less physical roles. Risky industries shed staff. Office work replaced site work. But those changes should have reversed by now. They haven't.

The data suggests something more permanent happened. New Zealand's 55-59 year olds are either working in fundamentally safer roles than they were five years ago, or they've left dangerous industries entirely. Either way, the result is the same: far fewer people in this age group are getting crushed, cut, or burned at work.

This matters because workers in their late fifties face different stakes than younger colleagues. A serious injury at 28 might mean six months off work. At 58, it can mean permanent disability, early retirement, and a decade of lost income before superannuation kicks in.

The improvement isn't just statistical noise. When serious injury numbers drop by more than half in four years, sustained across three consecutive years, that's a structural shift. Something about how New Zealand employs its late-career workers has fundamentally changed.

Nobody's celebrating this yet because nobody's noticed. But 5,616 fewer workers aged 55-59 were seriously injured in 2024 compared to 2020. That's 5,616 people who kept their health, their income, and their ability to retire on their own terms.

Whatever we're doing differently, we should probably figure out what it is and keep doing it.