Mock coffins filled one of Milan’s most famous squares on Friday in a protest organized by Italy’s second-largest industrial union to raise awareness of the deaths.
Protesters covered 172 cardboard coffins in Piazza La Scala to symbolize the exact number of those who died in the task last year in the northern region of Lombardy alone.
The UIL union said it demanded that the government and corporations do more for Italian workers.
“Today is a day of anger, of anguish, because in every coffin we have placed here there are names and surnames,” explained UIL union leader Enrico Vezza, noting that 41 employees have already lost their lives in Lombardy this year. . .
The union’s crusade is called “Zero Deaths. ” A poster in the center of the square showed the number of employees who have died since 2018, peaking at 1,709 in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic sent Italy’s death toll soaring.
Last year, another 1,041 people died in their workplaces in Italy.
According to the European statistics company Eurostat, Italy ranks eighth among European countries in terms of deaths at work, with an incidence of 2. 66 per 100,000 employees, compared to a European average of 1. 76.
Friday’s protest comes amid a heated debate over protection in Italy, following a spate of deaths across the country.
Earlier this month, five workers died at a sewage treatment plant near the southern city of Palermo, Sicily. In April, seven workers were killed in an explosion that destroyed several levels of an underground hydroelectric plant in northern Italy, while in mid-February, five employees of the structure died after a concrete beam collapsed at the site of a supermarket structure in Florence.
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