The Fight Against Accidents

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30074, 7 March 1963, Page 9

The Fight Against Accidents

bj C. V. WILLIAMS Senior Field Officer National Safety Association. The Labour Department’s exhibition is a valuable means of bringing home to people the need for and the benefits to be gained from safe working habits and practices. It is another of the educational media being used today in the campaign against industrial accidents, which, in this country, have risen to the colossal total of over 54,000 a year. The time lost in these accidents can be measured in millions of man-days and New Zealand cannot afford the enormous cost which they entail.

The National Safety Association of New Zealand has been working full time for eight years in industry, both secondary and primary, in an attempt to stem the rising tide, and it and the Department of Labour, a part of whose work is accident prevention, can take heart from the recent trend in accident frequency rates in the Dominion. The last figures available are those for 1961, but in that year, and also in 1960, the rate of accidents in relation to man-hours worked has decreased slightly but significantly.

New Zealand indeed is the only country in the Western world to have achieved this result, which has not come about by chance. It would appear that the safety educational work of the Association and

the Department of Labour, with its machine guarding enforcement powers, is at last beginning to take effect, and this exhibition will undoubtedly do much to further the crusade.