The judiciary considers an accident at work to be absence due to anxiety related to the harassment of colleagues

The Social Chamber of the Supreme Court of Cantabria recently rejected the appeal filed by the Government of that community against the sentence in which it was recognized as accident at work the low on anxiety from workers

The affected woman worked in the Ministry of Public Works as an operator in a team together with seven other employees.

According to the facts gathered in the verdict, the relationship with the two colleagues began to deteriorate to the extent that he began to receive derogatory comments “unrelated to his work activity”. As the document states, these “did not call the prosecutor by name, as they did with the rest of the gang”, but they called her “blonde, officer”.

Not only was there an intention on one occasion to verbally degrade her, as stated in the chronology of facts on which the punishment is based, but one of them “as if they were going to run over her with a steamroller”. The harassment did not stop despite the employee’s protest. In another time, and in the midst of discord at work “one of the aforementioned two workers told the prosecutor that there was nothing to discuss with her and to leave to take it in the ass».

The situation reached such a degree of tension that the woman developed a pathological picture, showing “heaviness, frequent lability, despair and anxiety”. Given the discomfort caused by the work environment, the worker turned to a doctor in search of “psychological and psychiatric” help.

After clinical trials, doctors found him suffering from “severe depression, generalized anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder”also manifesting behaviors such as “rumination, insomnia, depressed mood, listlessness, apathy, and anhedonia,” according to the sentence.

After the sick leave was granted, the woman requested that her case be considered an “accident at work”, a claim which the Social Court accepted, finding that there was a clear link between the work environment in which she worked and the anxiety he suffered, “with considering the absence of previous processes of temporary incapacity due to anxiety” related to the plaintiff.

The government of Cantabria appealed against this decision, but the judges rejected it, finding that “The requirement that work is the only causal factor for the leave is fulfilled, since a clear connection between the work factor and the clinical situation that determines the disability was observed, without any evidence of the acquisition of other causes”.

The sentence is not final and a cassation appeal can still be submitted to the Supreme Court.