While today's headlines report a dog attack in Timaru and food safety failures in salami production, there's a safety story that's been unfolding for four years without making a single front page: young New Zealanders are dramatically less likely to get seriously hurt at work than they were during COVID.

In 2020, 29,172 workers aged 15-29 suffered serious injuries on the job. Last year? 10,848. That's a 63% drop in four years. (Source: Stats NZ / ACC, fatal-serious-injuries)

This isn't a marginal improvement. This is the workplace injury rate for young people collapsing to levels not seen in the 24 years of available data. The 2024 figure is barely a third of what it was at the peak in 2021, when 29,790 young workers were injured seriously enough to trigger an ACC claim.

So what changed? The timing points to several overlapping factors. The pandemic forced many young workers out of high-risk hospitality and retail jobs. When they returned, businesses had spent two years obsessing over risk management, even if it was mostly about viral spread rather than workplace hazards. Border closures meant fewer working holidaymakers taking unfamiliar casual jobs. Remote work kept some young people away from physical workplaces entirely.

But here's what makes this drop genuinely puzzling: youth employment didn't collapse by 63%. Young people didn't stop working in dangerous industries. Construction, agriculture, forestry - the sectors that have always driven injury numbers - are still staffed by workers in their twenties. Yet the injury rate plummeted anyway.

The shift happened in two distinct phases. The first drop came between 2021 and 2022, when serious injuries fell from 29,790 to 12,444. That's a 58% reduction in a single year. Then the numbers stabilised, dropping more gradually: 11,601 in 2023, 10,848 in 2024.

This pattern suggests something structural changed in 2022, something that stuck. It wasn't a statistical blip. It wasn't a pandemic anomaly that reversed when life returned to normal. Whatever happened in that year - whether it was policy, workplace culture, or the simple fact that businesses had spent two years treating risk differently - it appears to have reset the baseline for workplace safety among young workers.

The lack of attention to this trend is remarkable. When injury numbers climb, they generate headlines. When they fall by nearly two-thirds, apparently nobody notices. Perhaps good news doesn't compete well with dog attacks and salami recalls. Or perhaps we're so conditioned to expect bad news about youth outcomes - housing unaffordability, mental health crises, declining incomes - that a dramatic improvement doesn't fit the narrative.

The question isn't just what happened. It's whether we understand it well enough to keep it going.