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It is an urgent plan to curb laboral casualties, agreed between the social agents and the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs
According to the statistics, every day work dies in Spain between four and five workers performing their tasks. The number of workers killed each year is close to the thousands, although efforts to reduce the claims were intensified during 2004 and therefore this fatal figure was not exceeded. During 2005, as of October, the number of fatal accidents increased already 849. With these figures, Spain has seven deaths per 100,000 workers while the European average is 4.
In order to try to reverse this trend, the Ministry of Labor and the social, employers and trade unions have agreed to a plan that will begin to be applied in early 2006 in order to control the 300 companies with the highest accident rate. The goal is to cover, in the long run, a thousand companies.
The control carried out by labor inspectors will focus on verifying whether the investigated companies comply with the coordination that the law requires to prevent occupational hazards. Although large builders bring together many of the casualties to work, attention will also be paid to the chemical, steel and shipbuilding industries.
One of the most unknown aspects of the deaths at work is its relationship with the traffic. Given the probability, provided by the UGT union, that between 30 and 40% of fatal accidents occur in the outward and return trips, the Ministry of Labor and the General Directorate of Traffic of the Ministry of the Interior will carry out a study to analyze it.
Finally, the agreement between the Government and social agents also has as its main objective to pay special attention to immigrant workers who are often exposed to work-related accidents. Among other measures, it is intended to distribute information in other languages in order to communicate to this important group their rights in matters of security.
