On February 9, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that a mishap suffered by a coffee break or sandwich, which ended with the temporary disability of a worker, must be an accident at work because “it must be understood as a normal activity of life work” that, if you had not been working, would not have occurred.
The magistrates of the Social Chamber have studied the case of a woman who in November 2016 “suffered a fall when she went from her workplace to a bar to have a snack.” Said fall will cause a “temporary disability situation” for which a file was later opened in which it was declared that the accident was work-related and that the responsibility lay with the corresponding mutual.
Why is it considered a temporary disability?
The mutual, dissatisfied with such a conclusion, took the case to court so that “the situation of temporary disability of the worker was declared derived from a non-work accident.” The Social Court Number 1 of Malaga dismissed the claim and agreed that “the accident took place at work, in the half-hour snack that is classified as working time by the collective agreement.”
Asepeyo, who appealed, argued that the presumption of an accident at work requires that it occur in the place and time of work, and also that the presence of the employee at the place where the accident occurred did not respond to any activity entrusted by the employer. .
There is a relationship between work and injury
But the Supreme Court considers that there is a causal relationship between work and the injury, “because the break was necessary and the use of the fifteen minutes of it by the worker occurs with criteria of total normality.”
The accident, the judgment states, occurred during work, “when it occurred during the working time available to the worker to regain her strength -a purpose that is pursued with the break whose time is qualified, precisely, as work-“.
The fact that the place where the accident occurred “was not properly the place of his professional activity does not alter the link between the accident and work, as his leaving the center for that purpose must be understood as a normal activity of working life, which if they were not providing services would not have occurred”.
