In 2024 in Lombardy, every 2 and a half days one person dies at work
CGIL, CISL and UIL bring together company representatives to ask the region for more safety training: there are 380 average accidents per day
MILAN – From 1 January to 31 March 2024, based on Inail data, every day in Lombardy around 380 accidents at work are reported > and every scant two and a half days a person dies, always at work. This evidence, which emerged during the speech of CISL regional secretary Roberta Vaia at a joint conference of trade unions, exemplifies the state of workplace safety in the area. The occasion was the regional assembly of workers’ representatives and confederal trade union delegates which took place this morning at the Teatro Civile in Milan, in which workers’ representatives met from all over the region to summarize, among others, what is the big need at the moment: training on safety. The invitation is therefore addressed directly to the Lombardy Region.
On the other hand, as the secretary of Uil Lombardia, Eloisa D’Acquino, underlines, “the scope of controls on construction sites is certainly of a national nature, However, the region can legislate on training issues, which is why we have asked to share guidelines and involve the employers on points that we consider qualifying”. During the morning, various direct experiences of workers took turns on stage and spoke about all the problems affecting this specific sector. “Training, which we consider important as a fundamental lever to protect the lives of workers, is done poorly, done little, sometimes it is a scam– observes Vaia- therefore we we want to start from here to start considering it as a real PPE, i.e. an individual protective device, therefore it is important for us that the piece of the DVR is delivered to the company (Document risk assessment, ed.) which indicates the risks to which workers are exposed and what the prevention and protection measures are”. For Vaia, this extract “must not simply be handed over, but must also be shared and transformed into an information tool”.
As D’Acquino from Uil points out, “in Lombardy there is an exponential increase in criminal complaints, complaints concerning irregularities in terms of safety and work, 10% of which concern the lack of training“. So the Lombard Uil secretary gives two small examples, “such as the on-the-job training that we have had with the experience at Expo also in other shipbuilding industries and which is essential for the purposes of prevention” and “the making available to all workers with the training booklet, which can be in electronic format and which certifies all the training provided”and obviously “an ad hoc regional plan”.
The Region must and can do more, as indeed does the government: “We expecteffective and concrete measures also from Rome, I am certainly not referring to the credit licence that they have launched because for us it is truly absurd to equate people’s lives with 30 credits”, urges D’Acquino. “We – he states – want initiatives that go in the direction of a national prevention strategy which has also been suggested and hoped for by the European Union, but which to date has not yet been launched”.
Along with the training booklet, the construction site badge is also required (“it is still a chimera but it is an important tool like the training booklet, so we will try to stimulate the Region, which considers them both fundamental to making them work. We know that the Lombardy Region cannot legislate on this issue, but it should act as a promoter within the State-Regions conference, within the areas. and put pressure on the government so that there can be a rule of this type”, says Vaia), but above all there is a strong demand for training that involves all the souls of the companies, including employers. “This – specifies the CISL secretary – is a request that the unions have been making for I don’t know how many years, because the employer is the only figure present in decree 81 who has very strong responsibilities but has no means only hour of training, and on this issue we are waiting for the State-Regions agreement which should be released in June 2022″. However, the important thing for Vaia “is that the agreement itself “does not become a mere bureaucratic requirement, but that the training is actually done well”.
And speaking of training ‘done well’, one point on which the Region stands out, represented by the general manager of the training and work area Paolo Mora, is the ineffectiveness of that done online. “In the rules that we strongly wanted in the past and also in the last months and years after the defended Covid, there is an obligation to have at least 50% of the hours in attendance – says Mora – and this applies to all funded training.” However, “I am of the opinion that we should raise this percentage for areas such as workplace safety, because I believe that distance learning in these contexts is absolutely ineffective, complementary training. We cannot think of base safety training on something that is not experiential, that is not experienced together”.
Mora finally explains how “the councilor (Tironi, ed.) asked us tocompulsorily include the teaching and therefore curricular hours of prevention and accident prevention within the professional training institutes under the jurisdiction of the Region”. On a general level, the regional manager then explains that in Lombardy there are 747 training bodies and of these substantially around 240-250 provide training on workplace safety, therefore around a third of the total.