A century of accidents in the Italian industry: Relationship with the production cycle

✍ Scribed by B. Fabiano; I. Parentini; A. Ferraiolo; R. Pastorino

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1995
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 634 KB
• Volume: 21
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0925-7535
• DOI: 10.1016/0925-7535(95)00043-7

✦ Synopsis

The purpose of this paper is to examine the fluctuations of accident frequency in the Italian industry during a period of time covering almost a hundred years (from 1890 to 1989) and to examine possible connections with industrial production fluctuations.

Notwithstanding the considerable variations of economic and social conditions and the increasing technological and scientific improvement, the number of accidents never drops below 110 cases per ! 000 workers/year.

We focused our attention on economic factors, which, especially over the long run, seem to be the most important, so as to set the basic trends in occupational accidents.

A nice parallelism between the economic cycle and the trend of accidents has been pointed out, differences not exceeding 20% over the whole period of observations. This relationship affords the opportunity to verify that the factors influencing human safety conditions in industrial activities do not depend on technological development.