Romain, Ludovic, Alban, Mohamed, Franck… And between each first name, 100 to 200 people chanting in unison “dead on the job”. In front of the square of Ajaccio (Paris 7e), bereaved relatives, some very moved, brandish faces, almost exclusively of men, often young. Most of them working in construction or agriculture, they all have in common that they have lost their lives in their workplace in recent months or years.
Saturday March 4, the young Family collective: stop death at work wanted to highlight the drama of fatal work accidents, which still affected 645 private sector employees in 2021 (for civil servants, self-employed and other statuses, the data is incomplete).
Created a few months ago at the instigation of Caroline Dilly, mother of Benjamin, 23-year-old roofer, who died following a fall on February 28, 2022, in Chinon, and Fabienne Bérard, mother of Flavien, who lost life on March 5, 2022, at the age of 27, on an oil drilling site in Charente, this collective allows families to support each other in the ordeal, and to help each other in the long administrative and legal suites that await them.
“Call out negligence”
“We felt so alone. We didn’t know anything, we realized that it’s a massive phenomenon. Since then, we support each other by going to each other’s trials.says M.me Berard. Re [la manifestation d’] today, we said to ourselves that we had to put faces to figures, and denounce the negligence in the way our young people are treated. »
After minutes of silence and applause, the collective expressed a number of grievances, before being received at the Ministry of Labor located just opposite: first, more transparency on the figures for death at work, and better support for families of victims.
Most of the time, relatives say they waited months before obtaining any explanation of the circumstances of the accident, due to the slowness of the investigations and trials. Nearly three years after the death of their son Jérémy Wasson, a 21-year-old engineering student, who fell from a roof on the third day of his “observation course”, his parents, who are not part of the collective but could join, still don’t know “what he was doing on that roof”. “The company was charged with manslaughter a year ago, but will appeal”says Valérie, her mother:
“We are appalled by the impunity of this employer and the slowness of justice. We will go to the end but we have ten years. And during this time, the company continues to receive dozens of interns from Jérémy’s school, is this normal? »
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