No room for complacency on workplace accidents
The European leather industry’s Green Deal Leather project reached a successful conclusion on May 16 with its final conference taking place in Brussels. The project ran for two years.
With funding from the European Union, Green Deal Leather focused jointly on workplace safety and on carbon footprint.
COTANCE hosted the Brussels event in partnership with trade union organisation industriAll Europe; more than 100 people attended. COTANCE and industriAll Europe refer to themselves as “social partners”. They have now been holding joint discussions about the leather industry and its employees in Europe for 25 years.
Preliminary results from this project show that tannery-related accidents in the seven EU countries surveyed (Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Portugal, Hungary and Austria) declined from 1,317 in 2019 to 1,102 in 2021. A fall of 16%.
More than 90% of accidents in 2021 were of “minor severity” and 15% of them occurred when people were travelling between work and home, but the project partners said they knew there was still room for improvement.
At the conference, industriAll secretary general, Judith Kirkton-Darling, said: “With the project’s preliminary results serving as a baseline, we must now work together to achieve zero accidents. We have a proud tradition of producing good quality leather here in Europe and we want to make the leather sector, like all manufacturing sectors, as green as possible.”
Part of this, she said, was making sure the industry has good occupational health and safety practices in place, with ongoing training and checks.
