Accidents at Workplace and Workers' Compensation in Spain: Methods are not Neutral

According to the ILO, 2.3 million people die every year from occupational accidents and diseases, and 337 million are affected by non-fatal accidents in the workplace. 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. In this study, 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. 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”. To illustrate the differences between the proposed method and the method has been used regularly in Spain, we present three real cases. In some of these cases the differences exceed EUR 200,000. 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.