Paris adopts a social charter to strengthen its prevention against accidents at work before the 2024 Olympics

A few days before the decried launch of the Football World Cup in Qatar, due, among other things, to the number of workers who died on the stadium sites, the Paris Council voted on Wednesday, November 16 to create a social charter aiming to make the capital, host city of the 2024 Olympic Games, an example in terms of workplace safety.

“Zero deaths at work objective”: the proposal of the deliberation displays its ambition. Led by the Communist and Citizen Group (GCC), the text provides that the city excludes the use, within the framework of its public orders, of companies condemned for non-compliance with labor law in the five years preceding the call for projects.

In the contract with the operator, a clause will provide for its termination in the event of a breach of health and safety, failure to pay wages and overtime or non-compliance with the rules relating to working time. In order to avoid the dilution of the responsibility of companies in the event of an accident at work, the deliberation voted by the Council of Paris also provides for limiting the level of accumulation of subcontractors by the operators involved in the realization of a project. .

The problem of outsourcing

The holder of a public contract is, in fact, free to use subcontractors to carry out certain tasks. “All the actors we met told us that one of the first problems is the cascading outsourcing”, said Nicolas Bonnet Ouladj. Prior to the vote on the deliberation, the president of the Communist and Citizen Group in Paris recalled that France was far from being exemplary in terms of workplace safety.

In the Île-de-France region alone, “the labor inspectorate received 140 reports from January 30 to August 30, 2022, including 38 fatalities”, compared to 34 the previous year, reported the chosen one. In order to “make visible this social fact” at the level of the capital, the text carried by the Communist Group also provides for the creation of a Parisian observatory of industrial accidents, as well as the strengthening of controls on the territory.

As part of the 2024 Olympic Games, a social charter had already been signed in 2018 by the employers’ organisations, trade unions and the local authorities involved in their organization, providing that the stakeholders monitor the grain in terms of compliance with the working conditions of employees working on construction sites.

The reserves of the municipal opposition

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