“During 2024, 26 fatal accidents at work were recorded in Calabria compared to over 8,800 overall accident reports. Although there was a slight decrease compared to the previous year, the figure remains absolutely unacceptable. 2025 also confirmed this worrying trend, placing Calabria among the Regions with the highest incidence of the phenomenon at a national level”. Thus Fillea Cgil Calabria on the occasion of the World Day for Health and Safety at Work, drawing “strongly attention to a real social emergency that continues to affect our country and, to a dramatic extent, our region”.
The causes: profit and exhausting pace
“Behind these statistics – continues the union – lie broken lives, destroyed families and deeply wounded communities. We are not faced with inescapable fatalities, but with the direct consequences of poor prevention, insufficient controls and a work organization which, too often, sacrifices human life on the altar of profit. Today we still find too many construction sites in which workers are forced to work grueling shifts, often exceeding ten hours a day. These are conditions which exponentially raise the risk of accidents: an unacceptable drift that tramples on the dignity of work”.
The proposals of Fillea CGIL
“The construction sector remains among the most exposed to risk”, underlines Fillea Cgil Calabria, relaunching some proposals: establishment of a special national prosecutor’s office dedicated exclusively to crimes linked to accidents and deaths at work, to guarantee uniformity, timeliness and certainty of investigations; introduction of free legal support for the families of victims, so that the search for truth and justice is not denied to anyone; reform of the Criminal Code with the strengthening of the regulatory framework through the introduction of the specific crime of manslaughter in the workplace; strengthening of the inspection bodies with the increase in staff and resources for the National Labor Inspectorate, Spisal and the Asp, which are currently dramatically undersized; contrast to ‘pirate’ training, which reduces safety to a simple purchased certificate: the training must be real, qualified and verifiable”.
Training and mobilization
“In the construction sector, in particular, we reiterate that the only true guarantee of safety is that offered by the bilateral system and by construction schools, essential safeguards of quality, legality and prevention. Safety at work cannot be perceived as an emergency only in the aftermath of a tragedy; it must become the daily imperative of institutions, businesses and the entire production system. April 28th – concludes Fillea Cgil Calabria – is not just a day of remembrance, but a moment of concrete mobilization. Dying at work is not, and will never be, acceptable in a civilized country”.