In the footwear industry, occupational risks are significant, and work accidents are frequent. Professionals in the field prepare documents and reports about these accidents, but the need for more time and resources limits learning based on past incidents. Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) methods have been applied to analyze data from these documents, identifying accident patterns and classifying the damage’s severity. However, evaluating the performance of these methods in different economic sectors is crucial. This study examined neural and non-neural methods for classifying the severity of workplace accidents in the footwear industry complex. The random forest (RF) and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) methods were the most effective non-neural methods. The neural methods 1D convolutional neural networks (1D-CNN) and bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) showed superior performance, with parameters above 98% and 99%, respectively, although with a longer training time. It is concluded that using these methods is viable for classifying accidents in the footwear industry. The methods can classify new accidents and simulate scenarios, demonstrating their adaptability and reliability in different economic sectors for accident prevention.