The International Labor Organization, the UN agency that keeps a watchful eye on such matters, just came up with a horrifying number: 2 million deaths a year from work-related accidents or job-induced illness. And that may be only the tip of the iceberg, ILO says in a report prepared for an international congress on occupational safety, in Vienna.

On-the-job accidents aside, the impact on health of asbestos and toxic chemicals is well known. Astonishingly, though, ILO notes that work-related communicable diseases were not mentioned in official statistics prior to 1990. Their number, including cases of cancer and circulatory ailments attributable to the workplace, has increased in the past dozen years, the report states.

Better news is that the incidence of fatal accidents rose only slightly in developing nations and actually dropped in most industrialized ones.

That 2 million figure of deaths pales in comparison to about 270 million workers estimated to be involved annually in industrial accidents -- 360,000 of them fatal -- and 160 million more afflicted with workplace-caused diseases.

Job-induced cancer is the biggest killer, causing about 640,000 deaths a year, or 32 percent of the at-work total of fatalities, ILO reports.

Circulatory ailments killed 23 percent, followed by accidents (19 percent) and communicable diseases (17 percent). Asbestos alone claims some 100,000 workers' lives annually, the agency estimates. (This is bad news for UN staff in New York, who have long voiced fears about a possibly serious asbestos hazard in the aging headquarters -- erected half a century ago, before architects recognized that the fireproofing mineral is lethal.)

Farming, in which more than half of the world's workers are engaged, claims about the same proportion of occupational deaths, injuries and diseases -- that is, 50 percent of the overall total -- says Jukka Talala, the ILO doctor who was the lead writer of the report. An especially heavy toll occurred in developing countries, where many workers are employed in agriculture, logging, fisheries and mining -- some of the riskiest industries.

Fatal accidents at work usually occur among those who otherwise would have a long employment career to look forward to, the report notes. In short, lives sacrificed to the corporate bottom line in many cases.

Juan Somavia, the director general of ILO, in commenting on the report, scored the inaction by governments and others. "The loss in GDP resulting from this reality is 20 times greater than all official development assistance to developing countries," he observed.

There is a big discrepancy, it seems, among countries in the treatment of industrial casualties. In the Nordic countries, compensation is almost universal but in the developing world only 10 percent of affected workers may claim benefits.