Fewer deaths with extra employees: accident charges fall by 13% in 2023 whereas employment grows by 4% | Economy | EUROtoday

721 individuals died of their office in 2023. The determine may be very excessive and displays structural issues within the Spanish labor market, however it’s accompanied by a optimistic perspective: deaths have fallen 12.7% in comparison with final 12 months, when 826 workers died . It is the most important drop lately, based on the provisional statistics of the Ministry of Labor, revealed this Tuesday. The determine has a fair higher studying if we evaluate the occupancy knowledge. If deaths remained steady at a proportional degree, the variety of deaths would develop as a lot because the variety of employees, however this isn’t the case: the 12.7% decline in deaths happens in the identical interval through which the variety of employees elevated by 3.8%.

Last 12 months's determine (826) was very unfavourable, the document of the sequence till now, vastly pushed by the shipwreck Villa de Pitanxo in February 2022, which value the lives of 21 sailors. But if the distortion within the figures because of this accident just isn’t taken into consideration, the determine additionally improves in comparison with final 12 months. It can also be a greater determine than that of 2021 (742) or 2020 (755), years conditioned by the coronavirus pandemic. But in 2019, with out the affect of the well being disaster, the identical deaths had been recorded as in 2023, 721, when at the moment a million fewer individuals had been working. Normally deaths had been rising together with will increase in employment, not like in 2023.

This downward evolution in deaths at work can also be perceived within the incidence price (quotient ensuing from the entire deaths, multiplied by 100,000 and divided by the annual common of Social Security associates). In 2023 it was 3.06, the bottom degree lately, properly under 3.78 final 12 months. This index varies vastly relying on the sector: it’s 11.69 in development, a worth nearly as excessive as that of agricultural actions (11.58). The accident price is way decrease in business (4.24) and providers (1.9).

In a convention on well being and security at work organized by UGT this Tuesday, the Secretary of State for Labor, Joaquín Pérez Rey, positively evaluated the information, however confused that “we share the objective” that “no person” suffers accidents. nor sicknesses within the office. “The dignity of work depends, first of all, on not getting sick or dying,” he indicated, based on the Servimedia company. Likewise, Pérez Rey has stated that in a “reasonably short” time, Spain could have an replace within the regulatory framework for the prevention of occupational dangers.

The CC OO Occupational Health skilled, Mariano Sanz, lately defined on this newspaper that the development within the figures has to do with the stabilization of employment lately. “The labor reform is helping. The fact that there is less temporary employment (it has fallen from 25% before the reform to 17% now), that the worker spends more time in his job to train better, that there is less turnover, I think everything has a lot to do with these figures. We have always said it: precariousness kills,” added the coordinator of the confederal secretariat of Occupational Health of UGT, José de las Morenas.

“We hope that this trend consolidates and intensifies, but there are elements in the overall accident rate that do not allow us to be so optimistic. We see how the general incidence of work accidents with sick leave is stagnant and thanks to a statistical effect due to the covid cases that in 2022 were counted as work accidents and in 2023 no longer”, they clarify in CC OO.

While the stabilization of employment tends to improve the figures, the aging of the Spanish workforce is pulling in the other direction. Experts associated the worsening numbers last year and in previous years with this phenomenon: the older the employees, the more likely they are to die during their workday. Today, employees over 50 years of age are 34%, when two decades ago they were 19%.

Worse than in Europe

All in all, Spain cannot boast too much compared to its European neighbors. The incidence of fatal accidents in the European Union is 1.76 per 100,000 workers, while in Spain it is 1.93. It is in a much better position than Latvia (4.29), Lithuania (3.75), Malta (3.34) or France (3.32), the countries with the worst data, but it is very far from those with the least accident rate suffer: Netherlands (0.33), Greece (0.58), Switzerland (0.75) or Finland (0.75. These Eurostat figures correspond to 2021, so they do not capture the impact of the labor reform in mortality from work in Spain, but they do have comparative value.

“In other European countries there is a much greater preventive culture than what we suffer from. The most advanced societies put occupational health and safety conditions at the forefront. We have a long way to go. We have a good law on the prevention of occupational risks, but we must update it,” says De las Morenas, who calls for extra inspectors to regulate corporations. The Labor Inspection unions point out that in Spain there may be one inspector or sub-inspector for each 15,000 employees, whereas the common for the European Union and what the International Labor Organization recommends is each 10,000.

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