California Workers Comp Injury Statistics From WCIRB Webinar
The Workers Comp Insurance Rating Bureau (WCIRB) webinar on April 18th was full of great info on the Golden State. You can find the slides from the webinar here. The slides are great California Workers Comp Injury Stats. Reviewing the slides will be well worth your time. The study covers the pre-pandemic year 2018 through post-pandemic 2022. The study was authored by Julia Zhang, PhD, YiChen Yu, MS, and Lucy Chen, ACAS.
Two of the slides from the presentation are included below. If you have any dealings with California Workers Comp, the report covers many injury statistics that would be invaluable to claim staff, risk managers, and employers. The slides contain a summary of the study and slides at the beginning.
New Employees Tend To Have More Accidents
Trainees and new employees have historically had Workers Comp injuries at a higher rate. The old saying that 90% of accidents occur the first time someone uses a tool, machine, etc. becomes very apparent when you look at the below chart. The one stark California workers comp injury statistic is the level of accident rate = twice as likely to have a claim in the first year of employment. Training new hires will always pay off in the long run. This chart illustrates it well.
This revelation comes as no surprise. However, the level of the one-year employee accident rate was much higher than I expected for California. The infamous accident curve study from many years ago showed what I had noticed in analyzing Workers Comp claim stats. I have written about this phenomenon often on this website.
Type of California Worker Comp Injury by Tenure
Injuries from strains increased significantly by the length of employment. The shorter tenure employees tended to not have strain injuries. As with the above chart, this was not an unexpected statistic. The share of stain injuries by workers with more than 10 years was almost 45%. This shows a need for safety and risk management to avoid strains of longer-tenured employees.
Bottom Line
This study and associated charts are worth your time to review. While the California workers comp injury statistics may have been expected, the significance of the statistics was surprising.
