Supreme Court confirms suicide of a supermarket worker was a work accident

The Supreme Court has confirmed that the suicide of a supermarket chain worker in April 2021 in Cantabria was a work accident.

This is clear from an order from the Social Chamber of the TS that inadmisses the appeal filed by the company against a previous ruling from the Superior Court of Justice of this autonomous community, which considered suicide a work accident and imposed on the mutual company the payment of compensation and widow’s and orphan’s pensions to the wife and 16-year-old daughter of the deceased.

In that resolution, issued a little over a year ago and which now becomes final, the Social Chamber of the TSJC upheld the widow’s appeal against the ruling of Court number 3 of Santander, which in the summer of 2022 concluded that suicide was not was linked to the problems that the man suffered at work but rather to marital problems and his father’s illness (the Labour Inspection did find a causal link between work and suicide and lack of evaluation of psychosocial risks and adoption of preventive measures to eliminate or reduce them by the company).

But the Cantabrian high court revoked that conclusion, understanding that the “work-related” problems had a “clear temporal connection” with the suicide, since they had begun “just three months before the fatal outcome” and were “very present in the days before the decision to take his own life”, which took place “three days before” returning to his position.

And the employee had been sanctioned by the company for which he had worked since 2011 – first as a manager in a centre in Vitoria and since 2020 as manager of one of the chain’s stores in Santander – after receiving an anonymous complaint for workplace harassment of a colleague, which led to her transfer to another supermarket in Laredo.

“The concern about the possible consequences derived from the exercise of criminal action against him accompanied him until the day of his death and this concern has no other cause than the purely work-related one,” ruled the TSJ judges, who alluded to several searches that he carried out on the internet about harassment convictions.

Thus, in his opinion, it was “evident that there was a clear connection or relevant causal relationship between the suicidal action and the work”, that is, that the work or the circumstances in which the provision of labour services was carried out was “in the basis of the decision to take one’s life”.

In this sense, they stressed that the labour problems that began in January 2021, as a result of the harassment complaint, “persisted almost until the date of death.” And they understood that the illness suffered by the worker’s father or the problems with his wife were not relevant in this case, which “lacked the necessary entity to put an end to the relationship between the spouses.”

But “what is really relevant” for the Chamber of the Cantabrian high court that heard the appeal is that there was no psychiatric history or previous psychological pathologies that could unlink the man’s death with the work problems he suffered, which could have arisen from union elections.

For all these reasons, they concluded that “the decision to take his own life was closely and more than directly linked to his work and, specifically, to the situation arising from the lawsuit for workplace harassment and its consequences.”

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