HELENA - Young workers are more likely than any other age group to experience injury in the workplace.
The Montana State Fund — the state's largest provider of worker's compensation insurance — is launching a new campaign to hopefully catch the attention of young workers and reduce injuries on the job.
The new campaign, "Naked Without It," uses clever and out-of-the-box marketing and humor to raise awareness of the importance of workplace safety.
“We're drawing attention to the fact that you’d never go out in public without anything on. You know, you'd expose yourself to the elements. You'd have all sorts of exposure," said Montana State Fund President & CEO Holly O’Dell. "But yet, on the safety side, you know, we don't cover up our eyes like we should and have eye protection. We don't cover our ears like we need to and have ear protection. We're exposing ourselves on the safety side, and so this campaign’s drawing attention in a fun way.”
The commercial shows the unsafe worker Gary doing tasks throughout the workplace without clothes, representing the danger of doing jobs without proper safety precautions in place. According to a report from the Montana Department of Labor and Industry, in 2019, Montanans were more likely to experience non-fatal injuries and illnesses when compared to the national average.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says young workers between the ages of 15 and 24 are more likely to experience workplace injury than other age brackets. 3.2 million non-fatal job-related injuries requiring emergency department treatment occurred in adolescents and young adults between 2012 and 2018. Workers 18 to 19 years old had the highest rate of injuries.
“So, this is to pause, to take a moment to consider how to be safer on the job, and then to drive down the number of injuries that we have and accidents and fatalities. So, this campaign is designed to increase awareness so that we can drive down injuries in Montana, and that's the number one part of our mission and what we do,” says O’Dell.
