With 6.42 fatal accidents per 100 000 workers, Luxembourg recorded the highest rate of fatal accidents at work among EU states. The country was followed by Romania and Latvia. This information is published by EUROSTAT, to mark the World Day for Safety and Health at Work, an annual international campaign to promote safe, healthy and decent work, which is held on 28 April.
In 2018, almost 2.4 million non-fatal work accidents resulted in workers being absent from work for four days or more in the EU, while 2 954 work-related accidents were fatal.
Men were considerably more likely than women to have an accident at work. In 2018, almost 8 out of 10 (78%) non-fatal accidents and the vast majority (96%) of fatal accidents at work in the EU involved men.
Another way to analyze the information on accidents at work is to express the number of accidents in relation to the number of persons employed adjusted to reflect the relative size of the economic sectors at EU level; this produces a ratio referred to as the standardized incidence rate.
The standardized incidence rate has fallen over the past years in the EU: from 2.87 fatal accidents per 100 000 workers in 2010 to 2.21 in 2018.
Among individual EU Member states, the highest rates were recorded in Luxembourg with 6.42 fatal accidents per 100 000 workers, followed by Romania (5.27), Latvia (4.69), Cyprus (4.51) and Austria (4.31). In contrast, the Netherlands registered the lowest standardized incidence rate in 2018 with 0.87 fatal accidents per 100 000 workers. This was followed by Germany (1.00), Finland (1.28), Sweden (1.66) and Greece (1.69).
