Three stories of workplace deaths that could have been avoided

BarcelonaOn Friday, April 30, 2021, Chiqui had prepared a ColaCao and a cortado for her nephew Xavi and her son Carlos. At six in the morning, they were already leaving home for the factory, and, as always, she said goodbye to them from the doorway. A little later, she also headed to work. Around ten thirty, she received an unexpected visitor: it was Carlos, his face pale and sunken. "I stared at him and thought something had happened," Chiqui remembers. He took her hands and said, "Mom, Xavi had an accident at work and died."

When a traumatic situation occurs, such as the sudden death of a family member, the brain releases hormones linked to stress, such as adrenaline and cortisol. These prepare the body for the fight-or-flight response, but they also influence how we remember events: in fragmented form, with details that may be very vivid, but lacking the full context.

Chiqui wanted to scream, cry, and kick. For a few seconds, she couldn't even think about her son, who had been right there, trying to save Xavi as he was swallowed by a machine carrying roofing felt. "I only thought about how I would tell my sister," she recalls. The boy's mother lived in Roda de Berà, in Tarragonès. When Xavi started working, he had moved in with his aunt. She remembers how her sister collapsed, threw herself to the ground, and put her hands over her face. Her other son hugged her, tried to calm her, and said, "Mom, calm down. It was an accident, it was an accident."

At the time, Xavi's family still didn't know that the nineteen-year-old's death at the Cidac factory in Cornellà de Llobregat hadn't been a simple accident. The Labor Inspectorate report found violations of occupational risk regulations, twelve- to fourteen-hour shifts, and a workforce of very young and older workers in precarious conditions. After the initial assessment of the plant, a firefighter told them he'd never seen a company in such poor condition in all his years of work. That there were rats and a risk of collapse.

The person who explained these safety violations in detail was Paco, Chiqui's partner and Xavi's uncle, who was already a CGT representative at the time. "It's surprising that a company that violates all these regulations didn't stop. Because it didn't. It was working from minute zero, and the next day the employees were still going to work," he says. The machine that trapped his nephew cost only 300 euros to repair, he laments.

The first call between lawyers was for the company to deny any guilt. They offered to pay for the funeral, attributing the accident to human error. It's hard to believe, but four and a half years later, the criminal trial has still not taken place. "Justice takes a long time. You can't wait four or five years. It's inconceivable. The family can't move on," Paco criticizes.

At first, they mobilized to make Xavi's story known, organizing protests and appearing in the media to denounce the normalization of workplace accidents. They received support from unions and social movements, and even had frequent contact with the then Minister of Business and Labor, Roger Torrent. But over time, they admit, they forget about you. You don't move, you don't make a sound, and Xavi's story becomes just another number in a statistic, just another case.

"Well, we're not, but we try to get by because we have no other choice," says Chiqui. When they have a meal or a trip to the countryside together, they realize that a cousin is no longer with them. They miss Xavi, who always felt like singing a little flamenco after dinner. "We encourage them [the cousins] to keep doing things, to study, and we're always looking out for them. They have to keep celebrating and celebrating birthdays," she adds. They'll go to court until they can close this door and get "even 1% of what we used to call peace of mind."

Grief is a process of adaptation—in this case, to a reality in which a loved one is no longer with us—and, according to the classification of Swiss-American psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, it can include several stages. It doesn't always follow that order and of course it's not the same for everyone, but the author observed that after a loss, one can go through denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and finally, acceptance, in which we begin to live with the loss. But this path, which under normal conditions is already difficult, is cut short when external factors such as an eternal and costly judicial process are added.

Experiencing grief between trials

Roser Noguer and Núria Barnolas also remember March 28, 2018, Holy Thursday. The day their husband and father died in a work-related accident. Lluís worked at Vic Verd, a company majority-owned by the Osona city council. That night, he and his colleague were collecting glass in the city center. When they got out of the truck to take the trash from a restaurant, they felt a clec, as if the handbrake had sprung on. The street had a 14% gradient, and the vehicle began to tip backward. They both ran to stop it. But one of the wheels hit the sidewalk and spun unexpectedly, veering off course and hitting Lluís. He was 58 at the time.

"You're in shock because this is a healthy person, who leaves home, and in two hours he's dead. And then, when you're in shock, instead of trying to make the process easier for you, the company puts obstacles in your way that you have to jump over," Noguer recalls.

In addition to the bureaucracy already associated with death, both found themselves without knowing, for example, what the legal statute of limitations is for a labor-related offense or what rights you have when a family member dies at work. It didn't help that the company didn't show up at the first conciliation meeting with the Labor Department. "This is where the legal ordeal began," says Barnolas.

The first dispute was in the Granollers courts, and the ruling, according to the family, was "very biased." The evidence did not include the expert report they had submitted, which had warned of a problem with the truck's handbrake. "It should have been inspected at least six times, and they could only prove it had passed one," laments Noguer. They appealed the decision, and the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) ultimately ruled in their favor and recognized the company's liability.

The two, however, had to continue fighting to prevent Vic City Council from taking the case to the Supreme Court. They succeeded thanks to a petition drive and the support of opposition parties such as Capgirem Vic (the CUP candidate) and ERC, which pressured the municipal government. "This extended the process for us by another ten years," says Barnolas.

More than three years had passed since the accident, and the ordeal wasn't over. The marathon in court continued with a second lawsuit against the insurers Generali and Mutua General de Seguros (MGS) to obtain the compensation they were owed. Finally, they decided to reach a financial settlement, and in 2022, they were able to close the case. "Lluís's name—whom the company once accused of having a "reckless" attitude at the time of the accident—has now been cleared," concludes Noguer.

Mother and daughter acknowledge that it is now, seven years after his death, that they are beginning to go through the phases defined by Kübler-Ross. "Suddenly, there are days when I wake up very sad. Mourning hits you; all the crying you haven't done in six or seven years had stayed inside you, and you have to get it out," says Barnolas.

A fatal "cluster of errors"

Carlos's father (a fictitious name to ensure his anonymity) died while working the night shift at a factory in the Girona region. He remembers how he dressed quickly, still in shock, after being woken up in the middle of the night by his mother. He got in his car and went to the company, where a supervisor suggested that the accident was his father's fault. A machine used to move pallets hadn't detected the man and had crushed him in the waist, killing him. "I already knew it wasn't bad luck. It was a series of mistakes until the fatal event happened," explains Carles, who was only 24 years old at the time.

When the Labor Inspectorate inspected the facilities, they found deficiencies in the machines' safety systems and gave the company three months to fix them. According to the family's lawyer, the sensors that should have alerted them to a human presence were disabled, a common practice to "optimize time" and avoid production downtime.

The company attributed the accident to human error, but one of its insurance company employees showed up at the funeral home in the middle of the wake to offer Carlos and his siblings a financial settlement. "It was a very strange moment. They play a lot with ignorance, because if we had signed those documents, we might not have had the right to claim anything else," he explains. They refused, and the company paid for the funeral without consulting them first.

This happened in 2021, and since then, Carlos—he has a sister who lives abroad and a younger brother—has had to take on all the procedures arising from his father's death. Notaries, bank accounts, mortgages, utilities... All of this in a bureaucratic labyrinth of processes that he didn't even know how to implement. In fact, it wasn't until three months after the tragedy that a lawyer friend of the family warned him that they could appear as a private prosecutor. They weren't even aware that the Prosecutor's Office had already opened criminal proceedings for labor-related offenses.

Four years later, the trial has still not taken place. The family points to some of the company's executives as responsible and requests prison sentences for them. But the case remains open. "I think I'm on a kind of cloud. Sometimes I'm better, sometimes worse." Carlos admits that he went through a "very bad" time and needed psychological help. He also left a factory job because it reminded him too much of the circumstances in which his father had died. "I went to sleep as a child, and two days later I was grown," he says.

Last year in Catalonia, 88 people died at work. In the first seven months of 2025, the number has already risen to 64. These three stories are only part of the problem of workplace accidents, but they draw the same conclusion: their protagonists felt uninformed and alone in the face of endless litigation, while going through one of the worst moments of their lives. They all advocate for the need for specialized courts to expedite these types of cases. And, above all, measures to ensure that companies and public administrations take occupational risk prevention seriously and ensure that the grief of affected families no longer remains hidden behind statistics.