Accidents at work, in Italy rates below the European average, far below France, Spain and Germany

Accidents at work remain one of the most persistent critical issues in the Italian labour market. However, underlines the Fondazione Studi Consulenti del Lavoro report 'The territorial dimension of safety at work: the numbers for 2024', published in the last few hours, the most recent data released by Inail show signs of improvement. During 2024, there was a 1% drop in the overall number of reports of cases occurring to workers (from 519 thousand to 515 thousand cases), confirming a downward trend already observed in the comparison with the pre-pandemic period: compared to 2019, the drop stands at almost 8.5%, corresponding to around 50 thousand fewer cases. The fatal component of the phenomenon also shows a decrease: reported cases fall from 1,237 in 2019 to 1,189 in 2024 (-3.9%). And Italy has lower rates than the European average. The distance is significant with France, Spain and Germany.

The survey goes a step further and compares the situation in Italy with that in the rest of the European Union. According to the most up-to-date data released by Eurostat, in 2022 there were approximately 3 million non-fatal and 3,286 fatal accidents at work in the European Union. Compared to the previous year, there is a 3 per cent increase in cases, while fatalities show a modest decrease of 1.8 per cent. These statistics, the report emphasises, refer exclusively to accidents occurring during work, excluding commuting accidents, as these are not recorded homogeneously by all Member States.

To allow comparisons between Member States, Eurostat uses the standardised accident incidence rate, an indicator representing the number of compensated accidents per 100,000 employees, adjusted for differences in national production structures. The calculation is based only on accidents that resulted in an absence from work of at least four calendar days, including cases that also occurred in public spaces, while travelling, due to acute poisoning or due to voluntary acts of a third party. Self-inflicted injuries, injuries due to medical causes (e.g. heart attack or stroke) and, indeed, commuting injuries are excluded. To avoid distortions due to the different sectoral composition of the national economic systems, Eurostat standardises the sectoral distribution of the employed, assigning each sector the same weight on an EU scale. Moreover, in the calculation of comparable rates between countries, road traffic accidents at work are excluded, since many countries - especially the Anglo-Saxon ones - do not record them as work-related accidents but as road traffic events.

According to these indicators, as far as accidents in general are concerned, Italy has significantly lower rates than the European average: in 2022 the rate was 96.8 cases per 10,000 employees, against an EU average of 134.2, and far below the values recorded in France (245.4), Spain (237.1) and Germany (153.5). This result may reflect both an actual lower incidence, a different propensity to report and a different production structure.

With reference to fatal cases, in 2022 Italy recorded an incidence of 0.87 fatal accidents per 100,000 employees, which is lower than the EU-27 average (1.26) and that of France (3.35) and Spain (1.53), but higher than Germany (0.61). Italy has historically maintained a lower incidence of fatal accidents than the European average, albeit with an anomaly in the 2020-2021 period, due to the inclusion - shared only with Spain and Slovenia - of Covid-19 contagions among occupational accidents, while most other States classified them as occupational diseases or common illnesses. In 2020 alone, in Italy, one-third of all work-related deaths were attributed to Covid-19, and more than one-fifth in 2021, with a significant impact on the rate increase.