Not every accident occurring at work or related to work is considered a work-related accident under Spanish law. Specifically, among other cases, an accident caused by willful misconduct or recklessness of the employee is not considered to be an accident at work, unless the recklessness is a consequence of the habitual execution of a job and derives from the trust that it inspires. It is necessary to analyze the totality of circumstances of the case at hand to determine whether the accident is work-related or not.
Spanish legislation contains a wide range of mandatory occupational risk prevention measures to protect employees during the provision of services to avoid occupational accidents.
Article 156, paragraph 1, of the Consolidated Text of the General Social Security Law defines an accident at work as “any bodily injury that the employee suffers on the occasion of or as a consequence of the work he/she performs as an employee”. Section 4.b) of this article goes on to clarify that “those that are due to malice or recklessness on the part of the injured employee” will not be considered work-related accidents, and the following section 5.a), in a further twist, goes on to clarify that the professional recklessness resulting from the habitual execution of a job and deriving from the trust that it inspires will not prevent the classification of an accident as work-related.
In practice, it can be difficult to determine which situations constitute an accident at work from those that do not, due to the presence of a fraudulent based on a reckless act of the employee, and when the recklessness that the employee may have committed has been a consequence of the habitual execution of a job. This determination, however, is crucial because the classification can have very different consequences, both for the employee and for the company, in terms of liability and compensation for the damage.
With this regulatory framework, any accident at work, whose origin comes from any imprudence committed by the employee, to a greater or lesser extent, will require a specific and individual analysis that allows to conclude if it can be classified as an accident at work, since no statements with a general vocation are possible.
In the judicial doctrine, a conduct in which manifest, unnecessary and especially serious risks are assumed, exceeding the normal behavior of people and disregarding the most elementary rules of prudence, is considered as a fraudulent and imprudent action, which exempts the classification as an accident at work. In other words, such behaviors by the employee in respect of which the adoption of safety measures by the employer could not have prevented the accident.
This definition must be taken into account to determine the classification of events that may fall on the borderline of one or the other figure and, based on it, our courts and tribunals have paid special attention to the specific circumstances of each accident, such as the place where the events took place, the time, the existing and applied safety and protection measures, the training and information provided, etc.
The judicial doctrine also reviews whether the employee has assumed unnecessary and particularly serious risks, assessing whether the actions of the employee in question can even understood be out of the ordinary for people, being this last element, which has mainly led to declare the concurrence of recklessness on the part of the employee, causing the accident.
Therefore, in matters of work-related accidents and possible imprudence on the part of the employee, there is no formula that allows us to obtain a quick and simple classification of the accident, but this does not imply that every accident occurring at work or related to it can be classified as work-related or that the employer must necessarily be held liable for it. It will be necessary to look at the specific circumstances of the case, which caused the accident in question.
