The president of the Île-de-France region, Valérie Pécresse, plans to create a collective to make progress on the safety of the Grand Paris Express (GPE) construction sites, after the fifth fatal work accident in early April. Five workers have died on the GPE site since the start of work in 2015, including Seydou Fofana, a 22-year-old apprentice crushed on April 6 by a concrete block on the site of line 17 of the future metro.
A memorial for the dead of the Grand Paris Express
“We are ready to create a collective in order to make progress on site safety (…). Such work could be undertaken with all the contracting authorities for public transport in Île-de-France, SNCF Réseau, the SGP, Île-de-France Mobilités, the RATP, the Regional Federation of Public Works, the services of labor inspection, those of the Cramif”, she declared in plenary session of the regional council. “Our objective is to build a continuum of security together, to hear the social partners and to go from prevention to the strengthening of controls carried out by the State”, she added.
Valérie Pécresse also proposed a “place of memory at the inauguration of the Grand Paris Express, in tribute to all the companions who will have left their lives on this site”. On the initiative of elected Communists, the Council of Paris voted at the end of 2022 a text aimed at making the capital an exemplary city in terms of safety at work by favoring, in its public contracts, companies that have used less than two levels of subcontracting.