Parliament's President Jose Maria Gil-Robles called for the EU's Social Action Programme to encompass health and safety issues and for EU legislation in the field to be respected. He was speaking at a health and safety conference organised at the EU's new Health and Safety Agency in Bilbao. Statistics show that, somewhere in the EU, a worker dies every 20 minutes as a result of an accident at work, with a further 80 workers injured every week.
Social Affairs Commissioner, Padraig Flynn, took the view that increased competitiveness was putting workers at risk. He called for health and safety issues to be placed at the top of the European agenda. The Health and Safety Agency, he said, would play a key role in disseminating information about best practices in the field.
Trade union leader, John Edmonds, urged the adoption of policies designed to reduce accidents to a minimum, while Dr Bodo Marschall from Volkswagen explained that new EU health and safety measures in the past had contributed to reducing accidents in VW plants from 5,500 in 1986 to 1,600 in 1987. The director of the agency, Mr Hans-Horst Konkolewsky, underlined his belief that health and safety issues should be seen as an aspect of job creation.