The National Sleep Foundation has conducted studies that show that workplace accidents, including those in the industrial sector, could be caused by workers who are too tired.
According to those studies, a worker who is highly sleepy could be up to 70 percent more likely to find himself or herself involved in some type of accident at work. The same goes for a worker who has chronic insomnia.
One study was carried out in Sweden, and it looked at almost 50,000 participants. What it found was that those who had sleep issues–like sleep apnea–were twice as likely to be killed in an accident at work.
Naturally, this does not always mean that the workers who were killed were at fault. The trouble with excessive sleepiness is that it can dull a person’s senses, and it can cause reaction times to be massively reduced. An accident caused by another worker may have been avoided by a worker who had gotten enough sleep, but someone who was too tired may not be able to get out of the way in time.
In some industries, the issues with sleep have been acknowledged and rules have been made to protect workers and the people around them. For example, truck drives have limits regarding the amount of hours they can drive in a row and how many days they can work in a week. Additionally, many companies have to give workers breaks every so often to help them feel refreshed and to prevent them from getting worn down.
If you’ve been injured because a sleepy worker caused an accident in Pennsylvania, you may be entitled to compensation.
Source: Sleep Foundation, “The Relationship Between Sleep And Industrial Accidents,” accessed March 03, 2016