A total of 5,631 dispatch workers were killed or injured in work-related accidents in 2008, many of them inexperienced workers in the manufacturing industry, according to a Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry report.
While the figure is 254 lower than in 2007, it is still high–more than eight times the number injured or killed in 2004, when a ban on dispatching workers to the manufacturing industry was lifted.
The manufacturing industry accounted for 64.8 percent of cases–62.9 percent of whom were workers with less than one year’s experience at the companies in question.
