There was nothing to do for the 49-year-old mechanical worker who got injured this morning while working on a lathe in a company in Busto Arsizio, in the province of Varese. He was crushed between the gears, just as the Senate chamber observed a minute of silence to remember Luana D’Orazio, the 22-year-old textile worker who two days ago was crushed in a machine in the Prato company where she worked . Reports of fatal injuries continue to rise. The issue is very complex and largely concerns the culture of prevention and training, as well as Covid, which had a very strong impact, as Inail explains on the white deaths of 2020, especially in the health sector. However, limiting ourselves to the data, the reports of accidents at work with a fatal outcome presented to the Institute in the first three months of the year were 185, 19 more than the 166 reports registered in the first quarter of 2020 (+ 11.4%) , effect of the increases observed in all the months of 2021 compared to those of 2020. Inail therefore recorded over 2 deaths a day at work in the first three months of the year.
Ten years ago white deaths below a thousand
If we take the whole of 2020, there were 1,270 injuries with fatal outcome, 16.6% more than the previous year. If we divide 1,270 by 365 we get 3.47. Last year between 3 and 4 people died every day in construction sites, factories, hospitals. The 2020 data shows an increase of 181 cases compared to the 1,089 recorded in 2019 (+ 16.6%) and, as Inail explains, the increase is mainly influenced by the deaths that occurred and registered as at 31 December 2020 due to the infection from Covid-19 in the workplace, which, in 2020, accounted for about one third of the deaths reported to Inail since the beginning of the year. We are very far from the data of a decade ago, when the dead were below one thousand. In a decade, deaths at work have increased at the rate of almost one per day.
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In three months 40 more deaths
Returning to the Inail data for the first quarter of this year, a decrease is observed only in ongoing cases, which went from 52 to 31. Those that occurred during work were 40 more (from 114 to 154). The increase concerned all three insurance management of industry and services (from 146 to 158 complaints), agriculture (from 11 to 16) and the State account (from 9 to 11). The territorial analysis shows an increase of two fatalities in the North-West (from 45 to 47), of four in the North-East (from 34 to 38). The Center did worse (from 23 to 34 dead) and the South (from 47 to 58). In the islands, on the other hand, there is a decrease of nine deaths (from 17 to 8). The regions with the greatest increase are Lazio with 12 more cases, Abruzzo (+8), Lombardy (+6) and Campania (+5), those with the greatest decline are Sicily (- 7 cases), Piedmont and Puglia (-4 deaths for both). “This dripping is not worthy of a civilized country – underlines Pierpaolo Bombardieri, general secretary of UIL -. Prevention and training must become a strategy and a political choice, with more resources to secure production processes and with more inspectors, more controls and coordination of interventions ».
The deaths concentrated among men and over 50
The gender analysis tells us that men are dying the most, whose reported fatalities have gone from 155 to 171. Women, on the other hand, have gone from 11 to 14. If the deaths of Italian workers increase, those of non-EU citizens decrease and community. As for age, on the other hand, the deaths at work under 40 were 17 less, while those in the 50-59 age group increased, which went from 52 to 70 cases and those in the 60-69 age group, which are even doubled, going from 19 to 38.
Injuries overall are decreasing
By broadening the objective and taking into consideration the complaints of accidents at work presented to Inail as a whole by March, there were 128,671, down by over two thousand cases (-1.7%) compared to 130,905 in the first quarter of 2020. a decrease of 1.7% for the entire period is the summary of a decrease in complaints observed in the first two months (-12%) and an increase in March (+ 35%) in the comparison between the two years.