Mr President, I wish, first of all, to congratulate the rapporteur, Mr Skinner, for his efforts in moderating and reconciling the various interests so that Parliament can make a positive, consensual contribution to improving this excellent Commission proposal. Negligence in work organisation, a lack of appropriate equipment for personal and collective safety, the low level of training and the high number of self-employed workers are the main causes of the high level of injuries and deaths in the workplace. The risks inherent in the building industry are even greater when compared with other, similar sectors. Over the last 50 years, business activity has increased apace, and immigrant workers and sub-contractors are used to a great extent. Apart from the aspects that have already been mentioned, the problems of communication and organisation are getting worse, and there is a tendency for the safety of everyone on building sites to be neglected, and for responsibility to be watered down. It can never be stated too strongly that all the directives relating to the health and safety of workers and particularly the definition of responsibility contained in Directive 89/655/EEC are in force. These state that the employer, the owner of the site, is responsible for any accidents that happen there, and also for preventing them. The person responsible for the safety of the site is obliged to carry out a risk assessment and to ensure that checks on safety equipment used by everyone with access to the site, regardless of their job, employment status or length of service, have been carried out. The risk assessment has been carried out at a snail’s pace in the European Union, and this second revision is a positive sign that we really want to support and encourage. Even looking at the matter from a purely economic point of view, it is extremely worrying to note that in the European Union, in 1996, out of every 100 000 workers, 4 229 took more than three days’ sick leave as a result of accidents in the workplace. In that year, four million seven hundred thousand accidents took place. Although fatal accidents have decreased by 13%, which is to some extent linked to Community action between 1994 and 1996, there were still 5 549 deaths in 1996. It is estimated that the damage caused to the European economy in that year was around 146 million working days lost. It is particularly relevant to the debate on the directive that I mentioned earlier that, although the construction industry does not have the highest number of accidents, it does have the greatest number of fatal accidents, comparable only with the road haulage sector. Europe cannot at the same time consider itself to be the world’s leading social model and yet allow people to count for little and for their lives to be reduced to mere statistics. Men, especially young men under the age of 25, are the main victims of accidents in the workplace, but the probability of death as a result of an accident increases with age and is highest for those between 55 and 64 years old. This probability is highest in smaller companies – with up to 50 employees – and for self-employed workers, for whom the accident rate stands at 73.1% of all accidents in the workplace. This illustrates the need for measures to be adopted in professions with a high turnover of workers: measures which focus on young people’s qualifications, multidisciplinary solutions involving training and qualifications and the quality of SMEs in some sectors. Since the famous survey conducted in 1907 in the United States, when identification, compulsory registration, cause of death, the employer’s age, the worker’s age, name, circumstances and the accident itself were studied to establish costs and duties enabling workers to be better protected... (The President cut the speaker off) IN THE CHAIR: INGO FRIEDRICHVice-President

Political group: PSE