a teacher from Seine-Saint-Denis is carrying out his own investigation

Matthieu Lépine is a professor of historical past and geography, in Montreuil, in Seine-Saint-Denis, and he writes a chronicle, by a blog and one twitter account, work accidents, deadly accidents. Medical insurance formally lists 551 deadly accidents in 2018.

franceinfo: You your self noticed what number of, and the way do you do it?

Matthieu Lépine: on 2018, I didn’t do a exact sufficient job, however on 2019, in my census which is restricted to what will be discovered on the web, specifically within the regional day by day press, I recorded 412 deaths at work .

It is a determine which is way beneath actuality, since medical insurance solely identifies accidents within the non-public sector, so if we add the practically 10 million employees who don’t depend upon the social safety system , who’re for instance farmers, the self-employed, posted employees, undocumented employees, we might arrive at a determine which might be a lot larger than that which is introduced to us.

If we add to all this occupational illnesses, suicides, journey accidents, we shoot in France between 1,000 and 1,200 deaths, as a result of work annually.

Why are you doing this ?

I used to be shocked to see such a critical topic, with 630,000 injured per 12 months, so little handled. I began – like David Dufresne and his work on police violence – to make a depend of labor accidents, by reporting every time to the Minister of Labor, as he does for Place Beauvau. And I set myself the target of preventing towards the invisibilisation of victims since, more often than not, now we have very brief, very laconic articles, however what we overlook is that behind, there are damaged lives, damaged households.

What do these office accidents say?

They are saying that in 2020 we are able to nonetheless die at work. It additionally highlights the precariousness of labor as a result of there are various momentary employees in these deaths.

It additionally calls into query the duty of the principals. We are able to see that the additional the shopper is from the positioning, the extra recurring accidents are. There are loads of subcontractors within the accident victims.

It additionally offers meals for thought of new types of work, with individuals who discover themselves remoted, working alone – from the supply man to the self-employed particular person – who work alone in generally sophisticated situations.