Italy was shocked by the latest in a long string of workplace accidents when four people died and another was seriously injured Wednesday in an explosion at a fireworks factory near Orvieto.
Reacting to the incident, Democratic Party leader Walter Veltroni described the phenomenon of so-called white deaths' in the country as ''an uninterrupted tragedy''.
House Speaker Fausto Bertinotti said: ''The only regret I have about the government that has just ended is that it did not manage to eradicate the intolerable scourge of workplace mortalities in this country.'' But caretaker premier Romano Prodi pledged to push new safety laws through before elections, which are expected in April.
The latest incident happened at around 10.30 Wednesday at a family-owned factory in the town of S. Egidio di Madonna delle Macchie, on the border between Lazio and Umbria. Factory owner Renato Cignelli, his wife and two other family members were killed in the explosion. Police are working to determine the cause of the blast, which also put a fifth family member in hospital with severe burns.
''It's incredible that such serious accidents are still happening, especially in factories producing explosives which should have special checks,'' said the government's head of workplace safety, Giampaolo Patta.
Last year there were two similar incidents at fireworks firms in Italy. Three people died at a hillside factory in Gragnano near Naples in April in an explosion so violent that it carbonised surrounding trees and animals, and two were killed and 32 injured when a fireworks plant exploded in Piane di Montegiorgio near Fermo in May.
Wednesday's deaths come on the heels of two other work-related casualties in the last 24 hours. On Tuesday a roadworker was killed by a car on the A10 motorway near Genoa and a 54-year-old man in Ferrara was crushed to death in an accident involving a fork-lift truck. In another incident, two employees at a metalworking factory in Turin were injured when a boiler exploded.
The government has been under renewed pressure to improve workplace safety laws since seven people died in a fire at the ThyssenKrupp steelworks in Turin last December.
Unions have been calling for the government to increase safety spending by releasing some of the accounts surplus of the national institute for labour insurance, estimated at 12 billion euros.
According to the latest statistics from Eurostat, Italy's annual average of 2.5 deaths per 100,000 workers is below the EU average of 2.7. In the first nine months of 2007 official figures said there were 774 deaths in the workplace, 114 fewer than in 2006.
But unions argue these figures are unrealistic, since many accidents involve immigrant workers who are not included in the calculations as they work off the company books.
