A forklift in Catania, a forklift in Reggio Emilia, a press in Lucca: three fatal workplace accidents in one day underline a toll that unions say claims an average of three lives every 24 hours.
Three workers died in separate workplace accidents across Italy on Tuesday. They were the latest casualties in a crisis that trade unions say costs the country three lives a day and that the government has repeatedly pledged to address.
The first death was reported in the province of Lucca, where a thirty-year-old worker at a pharmaceutical company in Altopascio was crushed by an industrial press on Tuesday morning. The second occurred at the Mazzoni firm in Cavriago, in the Reggio Emilia area, where a worker was fatally crushed by a forklift. Later in the day, a third man — also thirty years old — was killed in Catania’s industrial zone when he was crushed by a forklift he was himself operating at a logistics company.
A rising toll
According to the national workplace accident insurance agency INAIL, fatal accident reports filed in the first eleven months of 2025 reached 1,002 in total. Of those, 729 occurred at the workplace itself — up 1% on the 722 recorded in the same period of 2024. Also, 273 involved fatal accidents during the commute to or from work, an increase of 3.4% on the 264 reported in the same period the previous year. INAIL has cautioned that the figures remain provisional.
Trade unions put the human reality of these statistics more starkly: an average of three workers die every day in Italy as a result of workplace accidents.
The problem is not confined to any single sector. Recent months have produced deaths in construction, logistics, manufacturing and pharmaceuticals. One of the most widely reported cases came in November, when a 66-year-old worker died after spending eleven hours trapped beneath rubble following the partial collapse of Rome’s medieval Torre dei Conti.
Government response
Premier Giorgia Meloni’s government has said that improving health and safety at work is a priority. In November, the cabinet introduced a digital badge scheme for contractors and subcontractors on construction sites, designed to improve traceability and accountability across complex supply chains. The measure is aimed particularly at a sector that consistently accounts for a disproportionate share of fatalities.
Critics and union representatives, however, argue that the pace and scale of the legislative response remains inadequate to a crisis in which the annual death toll consistently exceeds one thousand. The three deaths on Tuesday suggest the problem extends well beyond construction and cannot be addressed by sector-specific measures alone.
