A railway construction worker was killed early on the morning of Monday, July 1. The 49-year-old, who was part of a construction crew working on the Diedelsheim-Gondelsheim railway line in the Karlsruhe district, was hit and fatally injured by a passing regional train. No further details about the circumstances and causes are known so far.
In the same week, a construction worker also died on the premises of the Hamburg Aurubis copper smelter. On the morning of July 4, employees of a scaffolding company were loading a continuous casting line when several rods came loose from a crane and fell from a height of several meters. The worker was so badly injured in the head that he died shortly afterwards in hospital. He was only 26 years old.
Large construction site “Four” in Frankfurt am Main. A fatal accident due to falling parts occurred on this construction site in April 2024 (Photo by Feldarbeit / CC BY-SA 4.0)
Every year, hundreds of thousands of accidents occur at work in Germany, hundreds of which are fatal. According to statistics, more than 700,000 occupational accidents occur every year.
So far, the long-term trend has been a steady decline year on year. In the 10 years from 2011 to 2021, the total number of work-related accidents fell from 900,000 to 700,000. But this could change.
In recent years, especially since the corona pandemic when the motto “profits over lives” became the official policy directive, the numbers have been rising again. And especially since the German government has been pursuing an unbridled pro-war policy, the question arises: what will the orgy of rearmament and war cost the workers in taxes, cuts in real wages, deteriorating working conditions – and also in lives? What is the life of a worker worth?
Fatal occupational accidents, which had been steadily declining in the pre-pandemic era, could start to rise again. In 2011, 886 fatal occupational accidents were recorded (519 occupational accidents and 367 commuting accidents). In 2021, this number was 369, of which 100 commuting accidents. In the period from 2006 to 2021, the number of fatal accidents halved. In 2006, more than two out of every 100,000 workers were victims of a fatal occupational accident, in 2021 this was just under one in every 100,000. In the EU, the number fell from 2.31 fatal occupational accidents per 100,000 workers to 1.76 during this period. But this trend seems to have come to an end.
According to the German Social Accident Insurance Agency (DGUV), the total number of reportable occupational accidents in 2023 was almost 1 million. There were 783,462 occupational accidents and 184,355 accidents during commuting that resulted in “incapacity for work of more than three days, or death.”
More than 10,000 of these were recorded as serious occupational accidents “resulting in the payment of a pension or death benefit.” The number of fatal occupational accidents totaled 599 (381 at work and 218 as commuting accidents). In previous years, the total number of fatal occupational accidents was 508 in 2020, 628 in 2021 and 423 in 2022.
Overall, the figures are not very reliable. They are mainly collected by accident insurers, to whom not all accidents are reported. For example, construction companies that employ undocumented workers from Eastern Europe or Africa and hardly report them, even in the event of accidents, are responsible for the number of unreported cases. Others pay premiums for accident-free months, which can also distort the actual figures.
As for the coronavirus pandemic, lockdowns led to a relative decrease in accidents at work. However, it is unclear how many people were infected or died at work and this has not been recorded in detail. In total, at least 183,000 people have died from the coronavirus in Germany.
In any case, the pandemic has led to increased risks in the workplace. COVID-19 has caused a significant increase in occupational diseases. In 2022, the number of reports of suspected occupational diseases increased by 62 percent compared to the previous year, amounting to almost 370,000 reports. Almost 80 percent of these were related to suspected coronavirus or Long COVID. They mainly came from hospitals and nursing homes.
The German state-owned national railway company Deutsche Bahn, which is increasingly being cut back each year to help with the war budget, has recently suffered many serious and fatal accidents. In 2023, there were at least 11 fatal accidents on the railway. The fatalities included a driver, a shunting engineer, two track workers, six employees of external companies (in track construction and site maintenance) and an intern.
The construction industry is the leading cause of fatal accidents at work. On average, just over 14 percent of all occupational accidents occur in the construction industry. In other words, every seventh accident at work occurs on a construction site.
In 2011, more than 135,000 occupational accidents were reported on construction sites; by 2022, this number had fallen to just under 100,000. This trend could also be reversed. In order to prevent industrial accidents, it is necessary to take all technical safety measures and, above all, to train construction workers and equip them with personal protective equipment (PPE): safety shoes, helmets, safety glasses, hearing protection, gloves, ropes and safety rings, etc. But with the ever-increasing level of exploitation, a lack of trained foremen and a growing number of unskilled, unskilled workers, accidents are inevitably on the rise again.
In the decade from 2011 to 2021, an average of 118,000 workplace accidents occurred on construction sites each year, which equates to more than 320 accidents per day. These figures naturally include all accidents, from a slight crushing to a fatal fall from a roof. However, construction sites are particularly affected by serious and fatal accidents. Of the 118,000 work-related accidents per year, an average of 2,700 were serious and as many as 85 fatal. According to the construction union IG BAU, 74 fatal accidents occurred on construction sites in 2022. No figures are yet available for 2023.
In plain language, these figures mean that every four to five days, more than once a week, a worker dies on a German construction site. They fall from scaffolding or a roof, are crushed or buried by falling or toppling objects, or suffocate miserably when poisonous gases unexpectedly escape from a pipe.
These accidents show that it is precisely the poorly paid, unappreciated professions that are the most dangerous. The trade unions, especially the railway and transport union EVG, IG BAU and Germany’s largest union, IG Metall, which represents workers in the metalworking and mechanical engineering sectors, are partly responsible for this. In their support for big business and the government’s pro-war policies, they ensure that the safety of workers is given second place.
In the construction sector, the IG BAU recently missed the best chance to address the precarious situation of low wages with a high risk of accidents. It cancelled the first nationwide strike of construction workers in 22 years and agreed to a miserable wage settlement, after which the construction companies announced that 10,000 jobs would be cut.
In other words, IG BAU ensures that approximately 1 million construction workers not only bear the costs of corporate profits and pro-war policies through wage cuts and job losses, but also inevitably face an increased risk of accidents due to workforce reductions.
The World Socialist Website and the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party) call on all workers in such dangerous occupations to unite in rank-and-file committees that can act independently of the unions. In this way they can gather and make available all the necessary information and unite with colleagues in other workplaces and in other countries in the fight to defend their jobs and working conditions. The lives and well-being of workers are more important than profits! And the problems that workers face from global corporations and the war economy can best be tackled together internationally. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees was founded for precisely this purpose.
Normally, the specific circumstances and causes of fatal industrial accidents remain obscure. Apart from short, impersonal police reports, little is known about how a specific death occurred and what it means for relatives and colleagues. But there are increasingly exceptions to the rule.
After the death of 19-year-old railway trainee Simon Hedemann in September 2023, his parents fought for a full investigation. They told the WSWS: “Our son died in the line of duty, but we remain in the dark about HOW and WHY.”
Katharina Lopes Duarte, the partner of railway worker Ali Ceyhan, 33, who was also hit and killed by a train while working on the track in September 2023, went on the attack. “Ali must not disappear as a number in the statistics,” she told the WSWS.
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