Workplace Accidents and Self-Organized Criticality

TL;DR

This paper applies the concept of self-organized criticality from physics to analyze workplace accidents, revealing a power-law relationship that suggests a common underlying cause across all severities, with implications for safety culture improvements.

Contribution

It demonstrates that workplace accidents follow self-organized criticality, providing a scientific basis for the Heinrich accident triangle and emphasizing the importance of safety culture.

Findings

Power-law relationship between accident severity and frequency

Accidents across all labor categories follow the same scaling law

Supports the idea that changing safety attitudes can reduce accidents

Abstract

The occurrence of workplace accidents is described within the context of self-organized criticality, a theory from statistical physics that governs a wide range of phenomena across physics, biology, geosciences, economics, and the social sciences. Workplace accident data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reveal a power-law relationship between the number of accidents and their severity as measured by the number of days lost from work. This power-law scaling is indicative of workplace accidents being governed by self-organized criticality, suggesting that nearly all workplace accidents have a common underlying cause, independent of their severity. Such power-law scaling is found for all labor categories documented by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Our results provide scientific support for the Heinrich accident triangle, with the practical implication that suppressing the rate of severe accidents requires changing the attitude toward workplace safety in general. By creating a culture that values safety, empowers individuals, and strives to continuously improve, accident rates can be suppressed across the full range of severities.