Occupational safety and health in Europe - state and trends 2023 
European Agency for Safety and Health at Work – EU-OSHA 12 
The workforce structure also significantly changed during the past 15 years, requiring new or adapted 
prevention solutions, organisationally and technically.  
Statistics show a growing share of employment rates of female workers; between 2005 and 2021, 
the employment (activity) rate of women expanded from 56% to 67.7%. In 2005, approximately 
80 million women and 101 million men were employed in the EU. In 2005, this made the share of the 
female workforce 44.1%, and in 2021 this rate went up to 46.1%, that is, 90.2 million women and 
105.6 million men, together totalling 195.8 million.  
The share of older workers — between 55 and 64 years old — increased significantly, from 11.1% 
(2005) to 18.4% (2019). This corresponds to a growth from 20.1 million to 35.9 million employed persons, 
or of 79%. 
The migrant workforce in the EU27 also increased in the past two decades. The majority of  migrants 
are intra-EU, that is, all workers who are born in a Member State other than the one where they currently 
work and reside; this number is estimated at 10.4 million (2019), based on LFS data. Cross -border 
workers account for another 1.5 million and posted workers for 2.4 million. In 2020, 8.6 million extra-EU 
citizens (born outside the EU) were employed in the EU labour market, out of 196 million persons aged 
from 20 to 64 years, corresponding to 4.4% of the total. The sum of all different categories of mobile 
extra- and intra-EU workers is roughly 23 million, or about 12% of the EU workforce.  
When comparing 2005 with 2020, for most occupations higher skills are required. In this period, the 
share of occupations requiring the three lowest education levels fell from 24.5% to 15.5%; the share of 
occupations that require a tertiary education grew from 24.9% to 36.4%. 
Accidents at work 
Accidents at work are the most common indicator regarding the quality of prevention in an enterprise, 
a sector or a country. Between 1998 and 2019 (EU level), the incidence rate of non -fatal work 
accidents fell about 58%, from 4,089 to 1,713. Most of this decrease took place in the first half of this 
decade. Between 1998 and 2008, the incidence rate fell by 54%, and between 2009 and 2019 by 9%.  
Between 1998 and 2019, the incidence rate for fatal accidents dropped about 57% from 5.03 to 2.17, 
almost the same decrease as for non-fatal accidents.  
Four major sectors, agriculture, manufacturing, construction and transport, emp loyed just under 
40% of the workforce (in 1998 as well as in 2019). However, i n 1998, more than 60% of the accidents 
at work took place in these sectors, thus the reduction of accidents in these sectors was crucial for the 
overall reduction. In addition, economic developments — sector decline and shift of workforce between 
sectors — reduced the number of workers exposed to common safety risks in these sectors.  
There have always been concerns in national or sectoral case studies about underreporting of work  
accidents for different reasons: accidents suffered by self-employed who are not obliged to notify or 
are insured via private or non- occupational public health insurances, work -related traffic accidents that 
are reported as traffic accidents only, declaration of less severe accidents as private to avoid 
administrative burden, administrative burden in general. This leads to several approaches to estimate 
the true number of accidents at work. Currently, these estimates result in figures of around 5.45 million 
work accidents at EU27 level in 2019 for all economic sectors and all types of employment. That means 
that the reported 3.14 million accidents represent approximately 57.5% of all work accidents resulting in 
more than three days of absence, while 42.5% are not reported.