The Government launches a campaign on Monday to prevent serious and fatal workplace accidents, announced the Minister of Labor, Olivier Dussopt, who wants to cause an “electric shock” in public opinion.
It is “unbearable that in 2023 we can still die at work due to negligence or lack of prevention,” Dussopt declared at a press conference, stressing that many of these tragedies “could have been avoided.”
The fléau des accidents du travail tue encore deux personnes par jour en France chaque année, selon les chiffres rappelés par le minister, qui évoque “une form de plancher que n’arrivons pas à franchir autour de 700 décès par an”, after plus of 15 years.
“Culture of prevention”
Available on television, radio, social networks and the press, the campaign has as its motto “Corporate responsibility, everyone’s vigilance.” It aims to contribute to creating a “culture of prevention and risk reduction.”
Certain types of profiles are overexposed to the risk of suffering fatal workplace accidents, such as new hires, temporary workers and workers on secondment.
Hence “the importance of welcoming” future employees and of “training actions” launched by the professional sectors, insisted Olivier Dussopt.
Faced with increasingly frequent episodes of heat waves, the minister speaks of a “new difficulty” and announces the implementation of periodic and reinforced prevention actions.
In 2021, there were still 640,000 workplace accidents, of which 39,000 were serious and 696 fatal, according to figures from the Health Insurance and the MSA.
France, with poor results at the European Union level, ranks fourth among the countries most affected by this plague, behind Latvia, Lithuania and Malta, according to Eurostat data for the year 2021.
However, this classification should be put into perspective according to Olivier Dussopt, who calls for work to harmonize the indicators so that “these comparisons are as fair as possible.”
Source: BFM TV
