Labour conditions are back in the political conversation this week. Shane Jones accused the kiwifruit industry of "slave practices" in comments reported by RNZ. Whenever the subject of who does the hard yakka comes up, we picture the same person: young, fit, probably on a visa, probably on their feet all day.

Here's a number that should change that picture. In the most recent available figures, from 2024, New Zealanders aged 75 and over lodged 2,598 work injury claims (Source: Stats NZ, work-injuries-by-industry). Not 75-year-olds in general. Injuries at work, to people who have been eligible for superannuation for a decade.

That's roughly 50 a week. About ten every working day.

The trend is the real story. In 2012, the same age group recorded just 1,233 claims, the lowest figure in the series. Twelve years later the count has more than doubled. Nothing else in this dataset moves like that. The rise was near-relentless: 1,404 in 2013, 1,728 in 2014, 2,049 in 2015, then straight up through 2,334 and 2,487 to 2,520 in 2018. COVID interrupted it in 2020, when claims dropped to 2,211 as the country shut down. Then it resumed. By 2023 the figure hit 2,649, the highest in the sixteen years of data on the table.

The most likely reading is simple and not sinister: far more people over 75 are still working than were a decade ago, and injury counts follow exposure. If you have twice as many over-75s clocking on, you would expect something close to twice as many injuries even if every single workplace got no more dangerous. This dataset counts claims, not risk per hour worked, so it cannot separate "more workers" from "more hazardous work".

Worth being straight about the other caveats too. The 2009 to 2012 collapse, from 2,142 down to 1,233, is a suspiciously steep fall that lines up with the recession years, when work simply dried up. Base effects matter: doubling off a recession-era trough flatters the growth rate. Measure from 2009 instead and the increase is a much gentler 21 percent. And a 2024 figure tells you nothing about what happened last month.

But the point stands regardless of the denominator. Thousands of New Zealanders in their late seventies and eighties are being injured on the job, and the number in 2024 was higher than in any year before 2023. An injury at 78 is not an injury at 28. Recovery is slower, complications are more likely, and a fall that costs a young labourer three weeks can cost an older worker their independence.

One piece of genuinely good news to end on. The 2024 count of 2,598 was 51 lower than 2023, the first fall in four years. It is one year and one small dip, nowhere near enough to call a turning point. But after a decade of near-uninterrupted increases, a line that stops climbing is worth noticing.

My view: when we argue about who is being worked too hard in this country, we should stop assuming they are all young. Ten of them a day are over 75.