While headlines focus on isolated incidents like yesterday's dog attack in Timaru, a quieter story has unfolded across New Zealand's workplaces: young workers are suddenly, dramatically safer.

In 2021, 29,790 New Zealanders aged 15-29 suffered serious injuries at work. Last year, that number was 10,848. That's a 64% drop in three years. Nearly 19,000 fewer young people went to work and got hurt badly enough to file an ACC claim. (Source: Stats NZ / ACC, fatal-serious-injuries)

The shift happened fast. From 2020 to 2021, the numbers barely moved. Then between 2021 and 2022, serious injuries among young workers fell by more than half, from 29,790 to 12,444. They kept falling. By 2024, the rate had dropped to the lowest point in the entire 24-year dataset.

So what happened in 2022? The most obvious answer is also the most mundane: ACC changed how it classifies serious injuries. When a dataset drops by 58% in a single year and stays low, you're not looking at safer workplaces. You're looking at different paperwork.

But here's where it gets interesting. Even if the 2022 drop is mostly statistical housekeeping, the numbers kept falling. From 2022 to 2024, serious injuries to young workers dropped another 13%. That decline happened under consistent measurement. Something real is shifting.

The timing matters. COVID-19 reshuffled which industries hired young workers. Hospitality collapsed, then rebounded with different safety protocols. Construction boomed, but with tighter oversight after years of rising fatality rates. Retail and logistics saw automation reduce some of the most dangerous manual tasks.

Young workers also moved. Many left high-injury sectors like construction and agriculture for office jobs, tech roles, and remote work. When your first job is answering emails from home instead of climbing scaffolding, your injury risk drops to nearly zero.

The 2024 number, 10,848, is still 10,848 young people who went to work and got seriously hurt. That's 10,848 ACC claims, 10,848 recovery periods, 10,848 families dealing with medical appointments and lost income. It's not nothing.

But it's also 19,000 fewer than three years ago. Whether that's because of better safety culture, different jobs, or bureaucratic reclassification doesn't change the outcome: fewer young New Zealanders are ending their shifts in pain.

The question now is whether this holds. If the drop is real, we need to know why, so we can keep it going. If it's mostly statistical, we need to know that too, because 10,848 serious injuries in one age group in one year is still a crisis. Either way, the answer isn't in the headlines about individual incidents. It's in the numbers we stopped paying attention to.