Correcting the Hours and the Constant: A Two-Step Fix for Injury Rates in the Gulf

Injury rates in the Gulf are calculated with a formula built for the United States: cases × 200,000 ÷ hours worked, where 200,000 is the yearly hours of 100 full-time US workers. Both inputs that describe the workforce, the hours and the constant, rest on US conditions, and both are misapplied in the region. First, exposure hours are commonly estimated by counting every worker for 52 weeks a year, which treats annual leave and public holidays as work. Under the labour law of each Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) state this overstates hours by 10–16% and understates rates by 9–14%. Second, the constant does not describe the regional worker: under the statutory 48-hour week that applies in five of the six states, 200,000 hours equals only 88–93 full-time workers. This paper proposes a two-step fix. Step one corrects the hours, using a three-tier hierarchy that moves organisations from shortcuts to recorded working time. Step two, proposed for national regulators and statistics bodies, replaces 200,000 with a national reference base calculated by the National Reference Base (NRB) formula, which applies OSHA’s own method to national labour law and defines a statutory full-time-equivalent (FTE) worker; for Saudi Arabia it is 226,000. Under statutory 48-hour bases both steps raise the reported rate; in a worked example the rate rises by 27%, so the change cannot be read as cosmetic. Every rate should also be reported per 1,000,000 hours to preserve international comparability. A free companion calculator is available on thenearmissshow.com/calculator. Working paper, not peer reviewed.