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They were found sunken in a puddle of sludge and mud, embracing each other. The six Sicilian workers had been poisoned by fumes while cleaning a water-purification tank earlier this month in Mineo, a small city near Sicily's eastern coast.

In Italy, where the colour white is associated with innocence, they are called morti bianche, or white deaths. They are deaths that could have been prevented. The numbers are so gruesomely high that workplace safety is becoming an uncomfortable political issue for Silvio Berlusconi's new government.

An unusually high proportion of the victims are immigrants, adding to the perception that Italy's war against foreigners is reaching a new level of callousness. "Immigrants are the ones who are paying the highest price," said Paula Agnello Modica, 54, the union official in charge of workplace safety for CGIL, Italy's oldest and biggest union.

Dead workers are found almost every day in construction sites, shipyards and holding tanks. They are crushed by machines or charred by explosions. In Turin in December, seven workers died in a fire at a ThyssenKrupp steelworks.

The Italian research institute Eurispes says an average of 1,376 people die each year in workplace accidents. A recent Eurispes study on workplace safety was called Worse than War. It noted that the 5,252 workplace deaths in Italy between 2003 and 2006 vastly exceeded the U.S.-led coalition war dead in Iraq over a similar period. According to a 2005 report by the International Labour Organization, Italy has an annual fatality rate of 6.9 per 100,000 workers, the second highest of the 15 member states within the study.

In April, INCA, the acronym for the national welfare institute, said Italy was responsible for nearly one-quarter of all the workplace deaths in the European Union. In 2005, the latest year for which it had statistics, Italy had 918 such deaths. In Germany, with an economy almost twice as large as Italy's, the figure was 678.

Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, a ceaseless critic of lax workplace safety standards, has called the white deaths "massacres." The Vatican newspaper has compared them to a "plague."

Many of the workers involved in workplace accidents are immigrants without work permits and they reportedly die on their first day on the job. Coincidence? Not a chance, said Luciano Silvestri, general-secretary of CGIL Toscana, the union's Tuscany branch. "Companies always tell us that the young worker died on his first day of work."

Immigrants are sought by employers because they are willing to take low-paying jobs that Italians don't want to do, such as working in petrochemical factories or farms where pesticides are liberally used. Few insist, or are offered, regular work contracts. When a worker dies, a contract might be hastily drawn up with the employee's fake signature. It is done so the employer can avoid sanctions or fines for having hired a worker without the proper paperwork.

Italy does have comprehensive workplace safety legislation, called the Testo Unico, whose penalties were recently updated as the rising number of workplace deaths put the government under pressure to take action. The worst-offending employers face stiff fines, jail sentences or the closing of their businesses.

But union leaders say Confindustria, the Italian employers' federation, is trying to dilute the punishments. "Confindustria and the new government are trying to do everything they can to frustrate the unions' plans," CGIL's Ms. Modica said. "They have already decided to extend working time, ignoring that most of the deaths happen during the extra working time, when the workers are more stressed and tired."

Lorenzo Tondo is a freelance journalist based in Rome