The safety industry is properly intentioned in that they want to stop all incidents and injuries from happening again. Safety leaders and their programs intend to figure out what went wrong and fix it, fix the specific thing that went wrong, and make sure it does not happen again. This is the traditional side of safety that started with the industrial revolution in 1750-1760 and the invention of the steam engine. Employees and/or the public would get hurt, and engineers would seek to solve the problem and keep it from happening again. However, employees continue to be injured at high rates in our day and age. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (2020) reports that there were nearly 3 million workplace injuries (many life-altering and life-ending) in 2019 alone. Eisenbrey (2013) states that these incidents cost U.S. businesses 250 billion dollars a year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (2020) shows that although workplace incident rates have steadily declined by 28% over the last decade, rates for serious injuries and fatalities (SIFs) have remained virtually unchanged. The safety industry even has a special category for serious injuries called Serious Injury Fatality (SIF).
