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Man killed after falling into wine vat at Italian winery

One man drowned and another was in hospital after inhaling toxic fumes at a winery in the northern region of Veneto on Thursday.

Published: 15 September 2023 14:51 CEST

Ambulance Italy

Ambulance vehicles lined up outside the main emergency access of an Italian hospital. File photo by ANDREAS SOLARO / AFP

Marco Bettolini, 47, was killed after losing consciousness and falling into a wine vat at the Ca’ di Rajo winery in San Polo di Piave near Treviso, reported Italian news agency Ansa on Friday.

An unnamed 31-year-old colleague was in hospital after inhaling the poisonous gases while trying to save him.

READ ALSO: Italian man crushed to death by falling cheese wheels

Bettolini’s death was the fifth reported in Italian workplaces on Thursday alone, Ansa reported.

In Bologna, a 52-year-old worker was run over and crushed by a moving vehicle at Marconi airport while resurfacing the runway.

One man in Naples reportedly fell ten metres to his death from a warehouse roof while installing solar panels, and another died after being hit by a waste collection truck.

READ ALSO: Three dead after blast in Italian explosives factory

Another worker was crushed to death by a lorry in the hold of a ferry operated by the Caronte & Tourist company in the port of Salerno.

Thursday’s deaths were the latest in a long series of deadly workplace accidents reported in Italy.

On Wednesday, three people were killed in an explosion at a factory in Chieti, Abruzzo.

Italian transport unions at the end of August called a strike in protest after five railway workers died and two were reportedly injured after being hit by a train during maintenance works in northern Italy.

Italy recorded 776 fatal accidents on the job in 2020, according to EU statistics agency Eurostat – by far the highest rate of any European country.

Head of the CGIL transport workers’ union, Maurizio Landini, said at the end of August: “There is so much anger… It’s time to say enough, enough deaths at work.”

Elly Schlein, head of the centre-left Democratic Party, demanded an urgent plan to stop workplace fatalities, saying Italy “cannot be a country where people continue to die at work.”

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Are Italy’s workplaces more dangerous than elsewhere in Europe?

On Monday, five workers maintenance workers were killed on the island of Sicily after inhaling poisonous fumes at a sewage treatment plant.

This latest tragedy follows the high-profile deaths of five workers at a Florence construction site in February, and the deaths of seven workers in an explosion at a hydroelectric plant outside Bologna in April.

The frequency with which these stories appear in the headlines can make it seem like there’s a major workplace incident every other week in Italy.

The issue even made it into this year’s Sanremo music festival with Paolo Jannacci and Stefano Massini’s performance of L’Uomo nel lampo (‘The man in the flash’), introduced by host Amadeus with a sombre reflection on the number of people killed on the job in Italy every day (around three).

READ ALSO: Rome square filled with coffins in protest over Italy’s workplace deaths

But does Italy really perform significantly worse than the rest of Europe when it comes to worker protections, or does it just sometimes feel that way?

According to data from the European Commission’s statistics office, Eurostat, in 2021 (the most recent year for which data is available) Italy had the eighth highest number of fatalities out of the 27 EU countries, with 2.66 deaths per 100,000 workers – worse than Spain and Portugal, but better than France and Austria.

The worst three countries for worker deaths were Latvia, with 4.29 deaths per 100,000, followed by Lithuania (3.75) and Malta (3.34); while the three least-fatal countries for workers were Finland (0.75), Greece (0.58) and Holland (0.33).

Workplace deaths in Europe in 2021. Source: Eurostat

If you look at Eurostat’s standardised incidence rates – which adjust for the fact that domestic economies rely to a greater or lesser extent on different industries that carry different levels of worker risk – Italy remains in eighth place, but performs slightly worse, with more than 3 deaths per 100,000.

Data from Italy’s state-run Workers Compensation Authority, INAIL, shows that worker deaths in Italy dropped from more than ten per day in the early 1960’s to around one third that number in the early 90’s, but haven’t significantly declined since then.

INAIL figures also show that 191 people died at work in the first quarter of 2024 – no worse than any time in the past decade, when the numbers have consistently hovered around 200.

That’s not good enough for workers’ rights groups, who say those in power are failing to enforce adequate worker safety protections.

The Palermo chapter of workers union CGIL staged a general strike and a protest outside the city’s prefecture on Tuesday, following a national protest calling for better worker safety protections last month.

Cardboard coffins fill Rome’s Piazza del Popolo on March 19th in a protest drawing attention to the number of deaths at work in Italy. Photo by Tiziana FABI / AFP.

“A business model based on contracts, subcontracts and precariousness is a model that kills,” CGIL general secretary Maurizio Landini told reporters.

Unions are calling for “continuous and comprehensive inspections, supervision of the contracting system, and more attention to the training of workers.”

Initial reports showed that none of the workers who died on Monday were wearing personal protective equipment. One was retired, and two were not technically qualified to carry out the works.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella described the incident as “yet another unacceptable workplace massacre,” adding that he hoped that “full light will be shed” on the causes of the accident.

In a 2023 report, INAIL’s supervisory board noted that the authority had a significant budget surplus, but that it couldn’t be used for accident prevention because current regulations ringfence the funds for compensation payouts.

The authority’s exclusive focus on building up financial reserves for insurance claims while neglecting to fund worker safety initiatives is counter-productive, the board wrote, “perpetuating a vicious circle that diverts resources needed for prevention by pouring them into the Treasury in excess of real needs.”

Instead of simply building up reserves, they argue, the institute should focus its efforts on “decisive intervention” to reduce workplace accidents, “including through the funding of prevention initiatives”.

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