After a joint ministerial committee recommended derecognising accidents that occur on the way to work as work accidents, Labor Minister Yoav Ben Tzur (Shas) made it clear that he would not accept the recommendation.
The committee, headed by Director General of the Ministry of Labor Yisrael Ozan and Deputy Director of the National Insurance Institute for Disability and Rehabilitation Affairs Yarona Shalom, yesterday issued a report recommending derecognition of accidents that occur on the way to and from work as work accidents. Under the recommendation, people injured in such accidents would no longer be eligible for payments from the state, but instead would be advised to file a claim against private insurance companies.
Ben Tzur intends to reject this recommendation, and will not promote a change that would oblige people injured in road accidents on their way to and from work to sue insurance companies that provide compulsory vehicle insurance in court, instead of receiving a periodic payment from the National Insurance Institute.
The Minister is likely to adopt other recommendations of the Ministerial Committee after holding discussions on this topic. These include reducing the number of diseases recognized as work accidents, and forming a national authority for health and safety at work.
The committee’s report concludes that the state currently pays NIS 6.8 billion annually to people injured at work, 2.5 times the amount paid in 2017. The number of people receiving social welfare benefits for work-related disability rose from about 40,000 in 2012 to 68,000 in 2022, and the committee attributed this, among other things, to the high number of road accidents on the way to and from work.
In 2020, more than a quarter of work-related injuries in Israel, 26.5%, occurred in road accidents, compared to 22.4% in 2011.
This means, according to the committee, that an increasing proportion of state subsidy “no longer serves the primary purpose of the subsidy.” The Committee believes that these are accidents over which the employer has no control and cannot prevent them. 70% of accidents on the way to and from work are accidents involving road vehicles.
On the basis of these findings, the Committee recommends derecognising road accidents that occur on the way to and from work as work accidents that entitle those injured to receive state benefits. The Commission conducted a simulation which showed that the damages that an injured person would receive under the Road Accident Victims Compensation Act or under the Torts Act (if the accident did not involve a road vehicle) would not result in any economic damage compared to the work accident benefit, where the compensation for the road accident would likely be Above, any work accident benefit will be deducted from it, so the final amount is expected to be the same as it is today.
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However, the Committee acknowledges that its recommendation would make compensation procedures more complex. Injured people who are no longer known to have work-related injuries will have to file a lawsuit against the private insurance companies responsible for compulsory vehicle insurance, which is a very slow process. A year may pass between the accident and the filing of the claim in court, and several years may pass before a judgment is issued. This is compared to only a few months it took to obtain accident benefits from the National Insurance Institute.
Another drawback noted by the Commission is that the final payment by the insurer is usually in the form of a one-time payment, rather than a periodic payment that gives the affected person greater financial certainty over time.
circumstance. Ronen Vardi, an expert in industrial accidents, agrees that the committee’s recommendation could resolve some of the current duplication in compensation payments caused by insurance companies compensating the National Insurance Institute for payments to people injured in road accidents. However, he says the one-time payout represents a major drawback that detracts from the continuity of lifelong payments that sufferers currently receive. In addition, a person who is not recognized as injured at work will not receive compensation for loss of earning capacity from insurance companies.
Ronen estimates that many people injured in accidents that are not road accidents will also be at a disadvantage. They will now have to prove negligence on the part of those they injured, pay large fees to lawyers, and go through proceedings that can take years, some of which may end in a loss or a painful settlement. Ultimately, Ronen says, people will continue to pay the same premiums to the National Insurance Institute, which will not reduce the amounts it collects, but will get fewer rights.
Published by Globes, Israel Business News – en.globes.co.il – on January 8, 2025.
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