Retail and hospitality workers get hurt and do not claim. Safe Work Australia has put numbers on why

Who this workforce actually is

The profile covers the sales and service occupational group, which on the ABS Labour Force Survey ran to more than 2.3 million people in 2025. Thirty-eight per cent of them work in retail trade and 34 per cent in accommodation and food services. The workforce differs from the rest of the labour market on every measure the profile publishes, and the differences run the same way.

From the profile’s workforce overview. The age and casual figures are the two that carry the rest of the document: this is a young, casualised workforce, and the profile treats both as WHS vulnerabilities rather than as demographics.

The profile is explicit that these characteristics matter for safety and not just for industrial relations. Its own framing is that they are associated with increased WHS vulnerability and may reduce workers’ willingness or capacity to raise safety concerns or lodge compensation claims. That sentence sets up the finding that matters most, and it is worth noticing that the regulator wrote it at the top rather than burying it.

The injury picture, including one result worth acting on

Body stressing has been the most common injury type for this workforce every year since 2013-14, at 40.8 per cent of serious claims against 36.5 per cent across all occupations. More than half of those claims, 51.0 per cent, come from muscular stress while lifting, carrying or putting down objects, and 31.2 per cent of those involve crates, cartons, boxes, cases, drums, kegs and barrels. None of that will surprise anybody who has run a stockroom.

This will. The costliest body stressing claims are not the lifting ones. Claims with the mechanism repetitive movement, low muscle loading take almost six weeks longer than the median for other body stressing injuries and pay almost $10,000 more in median compensation. The profile describes the tasks that cause them as repeated actions performed with minimal force over long periods: continuously wiping surfaces, stocking shelves with small items, scanning items.

Our reading, and it is a view. Those are exactly the tasks a manual handling risk assessment tends to skip, because each individual movement is obviously safe and the hazard is the repetition. A control set built around lifting technique and weight limits will not touch them. If you have a body stressing problem in a retail or hospitality setting and your controls are all about lifting, the profile is pointing at the part of the job you have not assessed.

The psychosocial half

Serious mental health claims are less frequent than physical ones for this workforce but cost substantially more when they happen, in both time off and compensation. Across the compensation data, harassment or bullying, work pressure, and exposure to occupational violence together account for 73 per cent of serious mental health condition claims.

The survey evidence runs the same way. On the SuperFriend Indicators of a Thriving Workplace survey, sales and service workers score below all occupations on every domain measured, with the largest gap on capability, a measure of a workplace’s ability to reduce risks and address harm, where they sit 6 per cent lower. Twenty-five per cent report at least one day off in the past month from psychological distress, against 20 per cent across all occupations.

The finding that should change what you do

Retail trade and accommodation and food services both show a lower proportion of injured workers going on to make a serious claim than other industries prioritised in the Australian Work Health and Safety Strategy 2023-2033. The profile draws the obvious inference and states it plainly: the extent of work-related harm in these industries may not be fully reflected in compensation data, whether through injury severity, reporting behaviour or barriers to lodging a claim.

It then offers evidence for the third of those. It cites the ACTU’s Work Shouldn’t Hurt survey, in which retail workers gave three common reasons for not lodging a claim: they only needed a short time off, they feared it would harm their future employment, or they did not think they were entitled to compensation. An earlier round of the same survey found 28 per cent of retail workers had experienced intimidation or bullying by management when raising health and safety concerns, against 18 per cent of all workers. That is a union survey rather than regulator data, self-reported, and we note it as such; it is presented here because Safe Work Australia chose to cite it in an official profile, which is itself informative.

The profile adds two structural points. Accommodation and food services and retail trade have among the highest job-movement rates in the country, first and third respectively, so the workforce that would carry safety knowledge keeps turning over. And it notes evidence that younger workers may be exposed to harmful behaviours, citing a 2026 age-inclusion survey in which 39 per cent of younger workers reported discrimination or harassment and 36 per cent reported sexual harassment in the previous 12 months. That survey covers younger workers across the economy, not this occupational group specifically, and the profile presents it as context rather than as a measurement of sales and service work. We keep it in the same frame.

What a duty holder does with this. The claim-to-injury gap is not an argument that the risk is lower here. It is an argument that the instrument most employers use to judge their own risk, the claims file, reads low in precisely this sector, for reasons the regulator has now written down. A retail or hospitality PCBU reviewing its WHS performance on claims alone is reading a number that the national regulator has said understates the thing being measured. Incident and hazard reports, and whether workers believe raising one is safe, are doing more work here than the claims history is.