In this case it's much more likely shoddy journalism than those jobs being dangerous.
The author says things that sound factual ("Accidents, injuries and deaths are also commonplace") based on zero evidence ("with union leaders believing working on superyachts to be more dangerous than life on oil rigs").
Note that believing in something doesn't make it so and it's journalist's job to verify data behind believes when they use them to make strong claims like "Accidents, injuries and deaths are also commonplace".
Sadly, Guardian failed to do so, opting for lazy quoting that gives air of legitimacy to unsubstantiated "believes".
It's not like it would be hard for the author to do the math.
The article claims there are 37 thousand jobs on yachts.
25th most dangerous job ("heating, air conditioning and refrigeration mechanics and installers") had 8.4 fatalities per 100k workers per year.
That's 3.1 fatalities per 37k workers per year.
The article found 3 deaths per 18 years, which is 0.17 fatalities per year.
That's 16x less deaths than in 25th most dangerous job and 288x less than the most dangerous job.
I'm sure they don't know about all the deaths and we can argue about not all jobs on the yacht being equally dangerous but the safety margin in those calculations is pretty big.
The data doesn't support the claim that those are particularly dangerous jobs.
There have been more than 3 deaths in 18 years: you can look up the accident reports. Just because the Guardian focuses on three cases doesn't mean that those were all there were.
The oil rig death statistics are also difficult to interpret. In the UK, for example, there was one offshore oil death last year (per the HSE). Because it's a small industry, there's massive year-to-year variation in per-hundred-thousand rates. The Piper Alpha disaster in the late 80s had 167 deaths, which overwhelms those years where little goes wrong - but only if you look at the statistics over a longer period than 1 year.
The Guardian found three British fatalities. Presumably all the fatalities aren't British, it's just that information about the British fatalities were most accessible to the journalist.
The author says things that sound factual ("Accidents, injuries and deaths are also commonplace") based on zero evidence ("with union leaders believing working on superyachts to be more dangerous than life on oil rigs").
Note that believing in something doesn't make it so and it's journalist's job to verify data behind believes when they use them to make strong claims like "Accidents, injuries and deaths are also commonplace".
Sadly, Guardian failed to do so, opting for lazy quoting that gives air of legitimacy to unsubstantiated "believes".
It's not like it would be hard for the author to do the math.
According to https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/2018/01/09/work... oil rigs are not even in top 25 most dangerous jobs.
The article claims there are 37 thousand jobs on yachts.
25th most dangerous job ("heating, air conditioning and refrigeration mechanics and installers") had 8.4 fatalities per 100k workers per year.
That's 3.1 fatalities per 37k workers per year.
The article found 3 deaths per 18 years, which is 0.17 fatalities per year.
That's 16x less deaths than in 25th most dangerous job and 288x less than the most dangerous job.
I'm sure they don't know about all the deaths and we can argue about not all jobs on the yacht being equally dangerous but the safety margin in those calculations is pretty big.
The data doesn't support the claim that those are particularly dangerous jobs.