Since the start of construction sites linked to the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, there have been 87 work accidents, including eleven serious accidents but none fatal. This is the assessment carried out in mid-October and communicated on Tuesday, December 6, during a meeting at the Ministry of Labor devoted to “the prevention of serious and fatal accidents at work”.
Gaëtan Rudant, director of the Drieet (regional directorate for the economy, employment, labor and solidarity) of Ile-de-France, which oversees the labor inspectorate in particular, declared that “40% of these accidents involved people in temporary work”. These construction sites ” extraordinary “according to Mr. Rudant (“a dozen sites, forty project owners, 8,000 workers at any given time”), started almost two years ago but really ramped up in 2022.
Five hundred interventions this year
Since the beginning of 2022, “the labor inspectorate carried out five hundred interventions, i.e. one labor inspector mobilized every day, which provides the necessary visibility for effective control”, underlined Mr. Rudant. This resulted “Twenty-nine decisions to stop work to remove around a hundred workers from an imminent and serious risk”he specified.
“Even on such a large site, the reality of the risks we deal with is quite familiar (fall from height, lifting and handling equipment, electrical risks, etc.)”, he noted. If there is strong collaboration in terms of prevention and social dialogue with construction professionals, “we called the project owners three times to convey messages with some insistence”for example concerning the circulation of vehicles and pedestrians, he underlined.