Daylight Savings Time and Workplace Injuries

The findings of a study by researchers at the University of Michigan have recently been published in the Journal of Applied Psychology and they have come to an interesting, although predictable, conclusion. The researchers found that the switch to daylight savings time increases the rate of workplace injury.

 The team looked at mining injuries from 1983-2006 and compared this data with the amount of injuries occurring on the Monday following the switch to daylight savings time. Some of the findings included 5.7% more workplace injuries, 67.7% more lost workdays due to injury and 40 less minutes of sleep time for employees. The entire published article can be found here.

What is the takeaway from these findings? Let employees working in dangerous conditions have a little extra sleep by changing their start time. Better yet, don’t schedule any dangerous work to occur the particular Monday.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 7:45 am and is filed under Safety Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.