The News & Observer recently published an article exposing the under-reporting of workplace deaths by the North Carolina State Department of Labor. The Department reported only 23 deaths for 2013 and for 2014, the Department reported 44 deaths. However, even 44 deaths is significantly less than the 243 workplace deaths reported by the Department in 2001. In a 2009 press release by the Department of Labor, NC was “one of the safest states to work.” However, according to the N&O, this reduction in reported fatalities is due to a change in methodology, not safety.

In 2006 the N.C. Department of Labor began reporting only the deaths that the Department had authority to investigate. That policy change excluded independent contractors (self-employed workers’) as well as any death that falls under federal jurisdiction. Federal jurisdiction includes the death of a federal employee, any worker who dies while working on a military base or at a federal facility, any death in the mining industry, and any death that occurs around open waters including firefighters and divers. The State’s total also excludes laborers at small farms, owners of unincorporated companies, most workers’ who die on roads, and many workers’ who died months or years after the injury that eventually killed them.

Misclassification of workers’ as independent contractors (the topic of another investigation by the N&O) not only results in employers cheating the workers’’ compensation system by failing to obtain insurance, but it also results in inaccurate data reported by the Department of Labor. This under-reporting is not due to increased safety and enforcement by our State, it is due, in part, to employer fraud of misclassifying workers’.

Read more here.