When he takes up his post, this Monday, December 27, 2021, Pierrick Duchêne, 51, has already been railing against the machine he uses for several months. After two decades in the food industry, for five years he has been an automated press driver in a Point P. concrete block manufacturing agency in Geneston (Loire-Atlantique). For a year and a half, the good atmosphere at work, this fraternity of teamwork that he cherishes so much, has gradually disintegrated. The atmosphere became heavier. The pace, ever more infernal. Productivity targets are on the rise. And these machines, therefore, “always broken”he often fumes to his wife, Claudine.
That day, he didn’t even have to work. But because he was the type to “always help and troubleshoot”, said Claudine, he agreed to cut back a little on his vacation to take part in the machine maintenance and cleaning day. Pierrick Duchêne asked his son to be ready. As soon as the day ended, at 3 p.m., they had to go to the recycling center. But, around 11:30 a.m., he was found unconscious, in cardiorespiratory arrest, crushed under a concrete block grinding machine. Dispatched to the scene, the mobile emergency and resuscitation service restarts his heart, which stops again in the ambulance. Pierrick Duchêne died in hospital on January 2, 2022.
His story tragically echoes hundreds of others, occurring every year in France. In 2022, the National Health Insurance Fund recorded 738 fatal work accidents in the private sector, according to its annual report published in December 2023. 1% of them are linked to “machine risk” – to which we can add accidents linked to “mechanical handling”, also around 1%. According to the National Institute for Research and Safety (INRS), which lists incidents of this type more precisely, machines are involved in 10% to 15% of work accidents resulting in downtime of four days or more. , which represents around 55,000 accidents. Twenty of which are fatal each year.
“The festering fear of the factory because the factory, at the most basic, most perceptible level, constantly threatens the men it uses (…), it is our own tools which threaten us at the slightest inattention, it is the gears of the chain which brutally call us to order”wrote Robert Linhart, in The Workbench (Editions de Minuit), in 1978. Industry, and in particular metallurgy, is a sector of activity in which the risks to the health of workers are amplified by the use of tools and machines. Agricultural employees, chemical employees or construction workers are also very exposed. In the field, labor inspection services regularly report the presence of dangerous machines.
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