I Had No Idea We Finish So Many of Our Co-Workers Off

I’ve been following the case of the murdered Yale medical student Annie Le with some interest, developed  mainly from speculation about the incident that I stumbled upon in the blogosphere.

At first I bought into the theory that she was done away with by a jealous lover when she tried to break off the relationship to get married, but now the New Haven, Conn., police have squished that scenario, attributing it all to workplace violence.

Then just today I stumbled on another account of Ms. Le’s murder, which included this paragraph about murder as part of the wider problem of workplace accidents and fatalities:

According to the U.S. Department of Labor Occupational Health and Safety Administration, workplace violence in its most extreme form, homicide, is the fourth-leading cause of fatal occupational injury in the U.S. Statistics indicate there were 564 workplace homicides in 2005 in the United States, out of a total of 5,702 fatal work injuries.

So, nearly 10 percent of all fatalities at work are workers slaying one another? That’s a startling statistic to me. I wonder if the stats include off-site gack jobs, or if it’s just workplace-based murder. Either way, this is an alarming and shocking stat.

Time to retire.