“Labor accidents” (3/3). A significant part of occupational health problems goes under radars due to bypass strategies among employees: lack of information, fear of losing their job …
by Jules Thomas
Fall in roofers, cuts and burn in cooking, allergies and tendonitis in hairdressers, up to shipwrecks in sailors … “These are the risks of the profession” is a sentence that often returns to justify the accidents of the work of very exposed professions. “Anyway, we are forced to do it, work, if we have pain we do with it, it goes and then that’s it,” sums up a 27 -year -old cook interviewed as part of the Santpe sociological survey .
Published in August 2022, the study report incorporating this survey highlights that in hairstyle, catering and building workers from less than ten employees are more bad than what the official data say . “We quickly saw that there were fewer accidents of work declared in very small businesses, that health was declared good, while paradoxically there is more professional risks, and prevention is very poorly developed,”, raises Emilie Legrand, lecturer in sociology and scientific manager of Santpe. A discrepancy which is explained by the fact that employees often choose to hide their health problems.
The assessment commission of the sub-declaration of accidents at work and occupational diseases, chaired by a magistrate of the Court of Auditors, estimated in his 2021 report that almost half of the accidents at work were not Declared in the private sector, due to malfunctions of health insurance, and sometimes because of the camouflage strategies by employers.
It also reports an information deficit of employees on occupational health and safety, and not only in very small businesses. For lack of culture of prevention in their company, many employees are not aware of the risks to which they are exposed, or ignore that any lesion occurred within the framework of work is a work accident which must be declared to the employer under Twenty-four hours.
the fear of declaring an at
“In 2022, there were 37 declarations of work accident on 2,800 agents [of Pôle Emploi] in Normandy”, notes Florence Lépine, advisor and CGT delegate of the public operator in Rouen. It compares this figure with the number of attacks, which increased, between 2019 and 2021, by 72 % per telephone and 13 % in the reception areas. “It is very little, they are practically only physical and discomfort accidents, and none for burnout or anxiety crisis, because advisers do not think that a verbal aggression is an accident. While it can go Until death threats. “
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