Road accidents or while driving dangerous machinery, falls … Some 540,000 people were victims of work accidents in 2020, said the Secretary of State for Occupational Health on Tuesday, December 14. During the same year, 550 fatal accidents were recorded.
Estimated at nearly one million in 1950, the annual number of accidents in the general sector fell considerably, falling to around 650,000 in the 2010s, in parallel with an increase in the number of working people. in particular thanks to more secure equipment and more protective regulations.
But for ten years, “the number of accidents and their frequency index are no longer falling, except in 2020 when the number of accidents at work has fallen by 17.7%” due to confinements, noted the Secretary of State, presenting a roadmap on this subject for the period 2021-2025, in order to overcome this “landing”.
This new 2021-2025 occupational health plan will focus its efforts on vulnerable workers, in particular less experienced young people, who represent 15% of serious or fatal accidents. This fourth plan will also target the most accident-prone sectors: construction, agriculture, extractive industries and waste management.
In 2019, Health Insurance recorded 655,715 claims, many of them escaping official statistics such as self-employed, posted or undeclared workers.
The government also intends to step up its action on the environmental risks of employees, in the event of industrial disasters such as the Lubrizol fire, and on sexual violence at work.
In a presentation sent to AFP, Secretary of State Laurent Pietraszewski insisted on the “priority given to prevention”.