On Friday a demonstration was held in Milan’s Piazza La Scala, with demonstrators placing 172 cardboard coffins highlighting the number of deaths at work in Lombardy and Milan last year.
Some of the 172 coffins
The demonstration/campaign, organised by the UIL union(Union Italiana del Lavoro) is dubbed ‘Zero Deaths at Work,’ and seeks to draw attention to workplace safety issues. While calling on the Government to implement more effective measures against what the union's general secretary, Pierpaolo Bombardieri, says is like a civil war. A similar event was held in Rome in March highlight the 1,041 national fatalities, with another in Florence with 203 and another due in Naples.
The coffins – 1041 of them – in Rome earlier this year
Speaking at the event Bombardieri said: "Every year we have thousands of deaths at work throughout the country. It is an unacceptable situation, due to the lack of control, but also of legislation. Point based licenses are certainly not enough to stop fatal accidents on construction sites and in factories, we have also seen this in recent days. Then there is the great issue of illegal work and subcontracting, which have an extremely negative impact on worker safety the government and the unions should have a serious discussion." He was joined on stage by the mayor of Milan Beppe Sala and Enrico Vezza from the union, who added that 41 workers have already died in Lombardy this year.
The national statistics on display in the square on Friday
A sign in the square highlighted the number of deaths recorded in the country as a whole, as rising to 1,709 in 2020, but having declined since to last year’s number of 1,041 workplace fatalities. Eurostat ranks Italy as eighth among European countries with an incidence rate of 2.66 per 100,000 employed individuals, while the EU average is 1.76.
EU stats–for 2021 deaths per 100,000 workers Source Eurostats
Vertikal Comment
We have also heard that the number of serious no fatal incidents in Italy is stubbornly high, especially those resulting from falls from ladders, which according to those who have contacted us on this subject in the past are not usually recorded as falls from heights. Suggesting that if they were, perhaps there would be more pressure on companies to adopt powered access whenever possible. We have always been unable to verify these claims. But since we are on the subject of workplace incidents…
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