A sentence condemns the maintenance company that had hired him to compensate his daughter
A ruling from Social Court number 2 of Ciudad Real has declared the death from covid in the first wave of the pandemic of a maintenance worker at the La Mancha Centro hospital in Alcázar de San Juan (Ciudad Real) as a “work accident”.
Until now, these types of judicial decisions had focused on health workers, but here he acknowledges that the death of this worker, José Ángel Olivares, 51, in March 2020 can also be considered an accident at work. The sentence also condemns the company that had hired him and its insurer to pay the daughter of the deceased -he was divorced- the compensation provided for this contingency in the collective agreement of the Metal sector of Ciudad Real. The insured has given up filing an appeal and has agreed to pay this compensation.
José Ángel received a daily salary of 76.95 euros for working as a maintenance worker in this hospital. On March 23, 2020, he began sick leave due to “infectious contact or exposure” and four days later he died of “bilateral Covid-19 pneumonia, acute respiratory distress syndrome, and severe hypoxemic respiratory failure.”
Piecework
According to the sentence, “since it has been proven that the death followed the temporary disability without a continuity solution and that it was caused by the virus that determined the start of it, it would already be enough to declare that the contingency was the work accident ». His company and his insurer had claimed that José Ángel was not a health worker, so his death could not be considered to have been due to a work accident. However, the court specifies that this concept “refers broadly to the personnel who provide services in health or social health centers.”
In this case, the operator traveled throughout the hospital, including the floors with Covid patients, to repair damaged elements such as beds or oxygen systems and, according to the ruling, “in the early days of the pandemic he had to do it daily because the need and urgency in the admission of patients in those first moments, it overwhelmed the hospital” and these workers “only wore gloves and a mask.”
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