a book lifts the veil on the “invisible carnage” of the many fatal work accidents in France

It was a history and geography teacher from Montreuil, in Seine-Saint-Denis, who made it his crusade: to bring out the dead workers while exercising their profession from anonymity. He first made a blog of it: “A Popular History”, a Twitter account.

Here he has just published a book, The Invisible Hecatombto bring the victims out of invisibilization, to recount the very brutal circumstances of these deaths, to help the families mourn and understand.

Who are the dead of work?

The latest reliable figures available to Mathieu Lépine relate to the year 2019. By compiling the various tables of the different regimes, which no one does, underlines the teacher, he arrives at 896 deaths over the year. Over the past four years, it has identified 1,399 victims. 95% of them are men. Often young men for Mathieu Lépine, one case can sum up these fatal accidents at work.

This is that of Alban Millot, who died on his 25th birthday while installing photovoltaic panels on a roof in Ille-et-Vilaine. He was on probation and, rather than working with an older employee to mentor him and keep him safe, he teamed up with a 20-year-old. He was not wearing his safety gear. He fell from the roof. The company’s trial should take place in Rennes in a few months.

This death is emblematic because, for Mathieu Lépine, fatal accidents often occur among young people who are not supervised and have neither training nor experience. The pressure rests on the shoulders of these employees, often employed by subcontracting companies. Very recently, Dares, the statistical service of the Ministry of Labour, established a link between accidents at work and the fact of working for subcontracting companies, as if the ordering companies were delegating the risks. Note that France has the highest fatal accident rate in Europe, according to the European Trade Union Confederation.