The stretch of the Po Valley that extends between Bologna and Reggio Emilia has the largest concentration in Europe of industries that produce packaging and packaging machines. More or less in the center of this area, at the Bombonette di Camposanto, Laila el Harim died on August 3, 2021, a forty-year-old worker hired for a month and a half as head of the machine in the company of boxes, trays and cardboard packaging for pastry. The woman was trapped in a die-cutter on which the automatic safety device had been deactivated, as the labor inspectors who arrived after the accident have ascertained.
“The lock was operable, by the operator, only manually and not automatically, this allowed an unsafe operation that resulted in death by crushing”, wrote the technicians in the report that ended up on the desk of the Minister of Labor Andrea Orlando. In the following days, the secretary of the CGIL of Modena Manuela Gozzi, after meeting the managers of the company, reported that according to them the accident was caused by a carelessness of the worker. The public prosecutor of Modena investigated the owner of the factory and the safety officer for manslaughter.
It was not an isolated case, nor was it fortuitous. Just three months earlier, on May 3, 2021, a similar accident had caused the tragic death of a 22-year-old girl, Luana D’Orazio, employed in a textile factory in Montemurlo, near Prato, in Tuscany. D’Orazio had been trapped in a warping machine on which, according to the experts sent by the magistrates investigating the case, the protective shutter had not lowered, “a mechanism intended to prevent accidents at work”. The appraisal found that the photocell that would have automatically activated the protection had been deactivated. The public prosecutor of Prato investigated the two owners of the company, husband and wife, and the maintenance technician who may have tampered with the electrical panel for manslaughter and removal of accident prevention precautions. The suspicion is that in both cases the life-saving devices would have been tampered with to avoid continuous stop and go that would have slowed down production.
Three victims a day
The dramatic events of Laila el Harim and Luana D’Orazio have aroused unusual media attention. “There is one thing that is dear to all of us and to me in particular: try to do something to improve the unacceptable situation in terms of safety at work”, Prime Minister Mario Draghi told reporters during a meeting at the building Chigi.
Labor Minister Andrea Orlando has proposed a curriculum for companies, where to take into account accidents and actions to avoid them, and a competition to increase the number of labor inspectors. His predecessor Luigi Di Maio had also announced one on 7 August 2018, in the aftermath of a road accident in which twelve laborers had lost their lives returning from work in the fields of Foggia, but then nothing was done.
This time the competition is concrete, but reading the notice published in the Official Gazette carefully, the numbers are lower than those expected by the government. Of the 1,514 expected hires, 822 are destined for the National Labor Inspectorate, but among them the people who will go to the field will be 691 in total. Better than nothing, but according to the trade unions CGIL, CISL and UIL these are numbers that do not guarantee a system of accurate controls, for this reason it is also necessary to employ the personnel of INPS, INAIL and ASL.
In Europe
“Italy is one of the very few countries of the European Union without a national strategy for health and safety at work”, say the union leaders, who have drawn up a “Pact for health” which provides training courses for workers, a sort of license with points to be awarded to companies that comply with the rules, more inspections, more personal protective equipment, teaching in high schools of a subject that has at its center health and safety in the workplace. Only in this way, they explain, could Italy get closer to those countries of northern Europe that have managed to drastically reduce the number of accidents and victims. The figures speak for themselves: in Italy on average 2.6 workers per hundred thousand die, while the average in Europe is 2.2; 0.7 in the Netherlands; 1.11 in Germany; and 1.21 in Sweden.
In the Netherlands, trade associations and trade unions enter into agreements with concrete measures and solutions which are then codified in a “safety and health register” valid for the whole sector. In Germany, the government and federal states develop a “Common Occupational Safety and Health Strategy” together with the insurance companies, which in turn develop accident prevention rules and carry out checks – in addition to public inspections. Sweden has created its own agency, Mynak, which coordinates the security activities of government, companies and trade unions; researches work environments; evaluates the effects of the reforms and initiatives implemented; monitor the measures taken in other countries; and encourages the development of occupational health organizations.
In June 2021, the European Union adopted a new strategy to improve the health and safety of workers by 2027. The rules aim to prevent accidents, which have already dropped by 70% since 1994.
There are stricter limits for exposure to toxic substances such as asbestos, lead and cobalt; “Easy-to-use resources for the application of preventive measures in the workplace”; an initiative on mental health in the workplace; improving the collection of data on accidents and analyzing the causes that caused them.
The slogan “zero victims” used by the European Commissioner for Employment and Social Rights Nicolas Schmit to illustrate this strategy, however, risks breaking if we take into account the six workers per 100 thousand who lose their lives every year in Romania; and more generally if we look at the socio-economic imbalances between the countries of northern, southern and eastern Europe, which also affect the safety of workers.
In Italy, in the first six months of 2021, Inail registered 538 “white deaths”, on average three per day: they are less than in 2020, but accidents increased by 8.9 percent. The independent Observatory of Bologna instead counted 864 until 9 August, adding the victims on the roads and in itinere, that is to say while they were going to or returning from work.
The sectors most affected are agriculture, construction and manufacturing. Scrolling through the list of this worker Spoon River you will find everything: workers electrocuted by high voltage cables, farmers who have fallen under a tractor, masons who have fallen from a scaffolding, the 18-year-old newly hired in a naturalistic oasis and the trade unionist Adil Belakhdim overwhelmed by a truck during a picket in front of a Lidl depot in Biandrate, in the Novara area.
Not a day goes by without the death toll being updated. August 10 was yet another black day. At around 8 in the morning in San Paolo Argon, in the province of Bergamo, a 36-year-old Indian worker died falling from the roof of a foundry, the Toora Casting, where he was removing the asbestos covering. Two hours later, in Casnigo – also in the province of Bergamo – a 49-year-old truck driver was hit by a wave of caprolactam, a chemical substance used for the production of nylon, and was seriously injured. At the same time, a thousand kilometers further south, in Caggiano, in the province of Salerno, a 64-year-old farmer saw his tractor cut his leg off; while in a frozen food shop in the center of Asti a 56-year-old maintenance technician died of burns caused by the flame that exploded in the cold room he was repairing.
That same 10 August, in Massa Finalese, a small crowd gathered around the family of Laila el Harim. In the front row were mayors and administrators from all over the area, as well as the Moroccan consul. Between tears and emotion, the usual rhetorical “never again” that accompany every death at work resounded.
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