Home > The news of EUROGIP and occupational risks in Europe >
With 602,316 lost-time occupational injuries (OIs), the figure for 2018 was 3.2% higher than in 2017, according to the provisional statistics of the Ministry of Labour, Migration and Social Security. The number of fatal injuries also increased by 5.5%, to 652.
The biggest increases in the number of OIs concern construction (13.1%), the mining and quarrying industries (10.8%) and manufacturing industry (5.6%). In terms of the incidence rate (per 100,000 workers), on the other hand, there was a slight decline (0.2%).
Fatal OIs break down mainly into non-traumatic diseases (42% of the total) and traffic accidents (22%), the latter having increased by 41.3 % compared with 2017.
As regards reported occupational diseases (22,655), they increased by 14.4% compared with 2017. The under-reporting of diseases due to carcinogenic agents seems obvious to the Spanish trade union CCOO: “only 27 cases of occupational cancer were reported, whereas the most conservative estimates put them at about 10,000 per year”.
According to Pedro J. Linares, CCOO’s Secretary for Workplace Health, all these figures relating to the number of accidents at work do not reflect reality and will only increase with the growing number of fake freelance workers or cooperatives and with the platform economy.
