Abstract:

The strong commitment of the management of a company to the maintenance of a safe work environment is an important stimulus for its workers to be loyal to the company and to make every effort to keep the company profitable.In this paper we investigate by a sample survey in a sample of 763 workers who work in heavy industries in Greece the factors which contribute to the occurrence of accidence at work. An exploratory factor analysis  ,Reliability Analysis and  Multinomial Logistic Regression revealed the following factors which increase the frequency of occurrence of accidents at work: Exposure of the workers to physical or technical dangerous conditions at work, lack of inspections by the Government’s Safety Inspectors  , lack of training programs designed by the company in order to protect the workers from harmful machinery and to show to them the proper use of tools, lack of proper  maintenance of machinery and negligence in the part of the company in following the recommendations of safety inspectors. Cronbach”s Alpha for the variables of the questionnaire referring to the factors contributing to the occurrence of accidents is 0,81.A Multinomial Logistic Regression with dependent variable the question: did you have in the past an accident at work ,was carried out and revealed that the independent variables: lack of inspection of the machinery of the company, lack of proper training procedures for the workers of the company, inadequate work experience of the workers, lack of proper supervision and nature of work ,were statistically significant.The sample survey was carried out in January of 2013 and  it shows that the Safety Inspectors, which were public employees, should  make every effort to keep, with their efficient inspection visits, the industrial base of this country functioning properly in order to decrease the unemployment level in times of deep financial , social and  political  crisis in Greece.