Workers' Compensation and Moral Damage: A Methodological Proposal

In Spain, 12,816 workers died in workplace accidents between 1999 and 2007. Although the trend during the period was decreasing, still, 1160 workers died in 2007. As a consequence of these high figures, workers' compensation becomes a key element in the social justice system. In this work, we address the issues relating to workers' compensation to cover damages derived from work accidents and occupational diseases, when admitted blame or negligence of the employer in the adoption of security measures is involved. We propose a method based on the combined utilization of the traffic accidents scale, along with other innovative elements such as “quality adjusted life years, QALYs”. Compensation systems for accidents are usually based on four components: bodily injury, moral damage, property damage, and lost income. At the international level, legal compensation scales are being used to reduce arbitrariness and variability in the calculation of payments for personal injuries. Nevertheless, moral damage is vastly undervalued. Our method incorporates an economic valuation of moral damage based on willingness to pay for a QALY, a concept habitually employed in economic evaluation of health technologies. Monetary value of a QALY is established from totally independent criteria, that is, based on the willingness of the society to pay, and separated from the interests of the agents obliged to pay the compensation. Thus, in this sense, we can say that our method incorporates a social perspective and offers many advantages, both legal and methodological, with respect to existing procedures in Europe.