Between January and June 2023, a total of 34 workers lost their lives while carrying out their professional activities in the agricultural sector, a figure that is not the same, it is lower, but it has experienced a significant reduction compared to the period last year. In 2022, 58 people died as a result of a work accident in the primary sector, which represents a reduction of more than 40% in just 12 months. However, the union representatives are cautious regarding the improvement reflected in the statistics and refuse to be triumphant in the face of a specific piece of data that requires the prism of at least two years of distance to determine if it is a trend.
“It has been an unusual year for agriculture and for paid work within this sector, because there is less work, with the drought there are fewer laborers in the field, both permanent and temporary work,” says the head of the agricultural sector. in CCOO Industry, Vicente Jiménez, in conversation with La Información. However, he appreciates that in the last year there have been a number of positive advances, both at the regulatory level and in the framework of negotiations with employers. “Any agreement reached with the employer at the collective agreement level is always good to amend, rectify and apply the occupational risk prevention law and the relevant occupational health measures in each job,” he points out.
The workers’ representative explains that it is a multifactorial result, in which the decrease in accidents due to tractor overturns has an important weight. “There has been an awareness campaign by the Ministry on this issue, there were many deaths for this reason and we have noticed a decrease. It is necessary to adapt these work tools to European regulations and renew the agricultural mobile fleet in many areas where the The machinery is very old and does not comply with security measures”, denounces Jiménez.
An analysis that is also shared by the Secretary of Occupational Health and the Environment of UGT-FICA, Pilar Ituero, who understands that she values this campaign as “very necessary”, on the phone, with this medium. However, she emphasizes that the efforts carried out by Yolanda Díaz’s portfolio with this information campaign and the approval of a specific decree that established mandatory measures for work in extreme temperatures are not enough to make the sector safe. “It is marked by precariousness, high temporality, the lack of initial training of workers in preventive matters, the state of some machinery, the lack of risk prevention and occupational health measures,” she acknowledges.
The spokesman for the General Union of Workers appreciates that the primary sector has its own casuistry in which there are several factors that make it more difficult to monitor these risks. “There are many self-employed workers, a high seasonality, large workloads are concentrated at very specific times of the year, it is very masculinized and many work centers have difficult access,” he points out. In addition, foreign labor is used to cover the peaks of activity, which adds language barriers for raising awareness about occupational health. Ituero refuses to be triumphant regarding the latest data. “They have decreased, but it is a long-term process, since we start from inadmissible data.”
The union representative attributes the prominence of these data to the reduction in activity due to the drought, like his colleague, which leads him to be cautious in assessing the data. “It already happened with the covid, but later the accidents rebounded.” However, he glimpses certain “green shoots” that lead to positivity, such as the generational change through which younger workers are more trained and have a greater preventive culture or the introduction of new technologies that will progressively lead to less exposure to occupational hazards.
On the employer’s side, the Union of Small Farmers and Ranchers (UPA) also shares this diagnosis, according to the sources consulted by this medium, who celebrate the reduction seen in the last year. They point out the reduction in activity in the case of olive groves, cereals and wine, which produce fewer contracts and consequently also imply a lower accident rate. Although, from the association they point to a positive after years of awareness campaigns aimed at farmers on the importance of prevention in a sector exposed to so many risks when carrying out numerous activities with heavy machinery.
