LABOR

Worked to Death: If last year’s murder of a postal worker by a colleague at the Dana Point Post Office had you worried, you can breathe easier: You’re about as likely to win the lottery as die on the job.

For those few who do die at work in the Southwest, though, homicide is the leading cause of death, according to a recent study by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In other words, more people were killed by colleagues at work than were electrocuted or fell to their death or had car accidents or crashed in airplanes or were poisoned.

In fact, one in every four of the 700 people killed on the job in 1992 in the Southwest were murdered.

That’s 25%, of course; for the nation, the average was slightly lower, at 17%. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts the Southwest as California, Arizona, Hawaii and Nevada.)

The majority of the 173 workplace murders in the Southwest that year were shootings.

Car accidents were the second-leading cause of workplace deaths in the Southwest, accounting for 19%.

Across the nation, car accidents were the leading cause of workplace deaths, with 18% of the fatalities.

Men, by the way, were most likely overall to die on the job.