The conversation about safety usually stays with the risk-prevention specialist. This figure moves it to the CEO's office, because it stops being a compliance issue and becomes a margin issue.
This is not an estimate from a foreign consulting firm. It is a study by the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC), funded by ACHS (the Chilean Safety Association, one of the country's nonprofit workplace-accident insurers), that followed about 1,500 Chilean companies with real financial data between 2011 and 2013, drawn from a universe of 250,000 companies and two million insured workers.
The uncomfortable finding is the minor accidents
The ones that never reach the board, that are resolved with a short medical leave, and that the organization treats as normal.
A single minor incident reduces sales per worker by 4% in medium- and high-productivity companies. Ten accumulated minor accidents mean a drop of between 27% and 40%.
The average number of days lost per incident in Chile is 19 working days.
For every peso you see on the invoice, there are four and a half you don't
OSHA's official methodology for estimating the cost of workplace accidents sets an indirect-to-direct cost ratio of 4.5 to 1 for injuries with direct costs under $3,000. Its own example: an injury with $1,500 in direct costs represents $8,250 in total cost to the company.
The indirect cost is everything that never gets invoiced but everyone pays for:
- The incident investigation
- The supervisor's time
- The replacement worker and their learning curve
- The drop in team morale
- Rescheduling the job
- Overtime for those who remain
- The increase in the insurance premium
The paradox is that the ratio is higher for small accidents, precisely the ones the organization lets pass without analysis.
Company size changes the equation
The same PUC study broke down accident rates by company size. Companies with up to 100 workers record 4.5 accidents per 100 workers. Those with 500 or more, 3.0.
By sector, manufacturing leads with 5.3, followed by transportation at 5.1, agriculture at 4.7, and construction at 4.6.
The gap is not explained by carelessness. It is explained by structure: a large company has a prevention department, a training budget, in-house instructors, and the capacity to pull people off production. A mid-sized or small company has one prevention specialist who does everything and a line that cannot stop.
The national context
Chile closed 2024 with 199,874 workplace accidents and 154 workers killed, according to SUSESO (Chile's Superintendency of Social Security), out of 7.2 million workers covered by Ley 16.744 (Chile's workplace accident and occupational disease insurance law).
There has been real progress, and it should be acknowledged: accidents fell 4.3% compared with 2023, serious accidents dropped 8%, traumatic amputations 19%, and there were 46 fewer deaths than the year before. The fatality rate stands at 2.1 per 100,000 covered workers.
And still, 154 people who went to work did not come home. Three a week.
What to do with these numbers
When someone says a training program is expensive, the right question is not how much the program costs. It is how many minor accidents you need to prevent each year to pay for it.
That calculation is almost never done, and it almost always comes out in favor of the program. With the PUC figure and the OSHA ratio, anyone can run it with their own company's numbers in an afternoon.
And that is where the discussion about building real competence stops being a matter for the prevention department and becomes a productivity issue that nobody managed to explain.
Sources: Tarziján (PUC) & Matamala (UCLA Anderson) for ACHS/FUCYT, 2017 · OSHA — U.S. Department of Labor, $afety Pays estimator · SUSESO — Annual Report on Occupational Safety and Health, 2025