Israel High Court: Employer bears full blame for Palestinian’s paralysis in fall

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A cleaner who was paralyzed after falling down an unfenced elevator shaft at a construction site bears no blame for the accident and is therefore entitled to full compensation, the Supreme Court has ruled.

The justices said they made this decision due to the inherent imbalance of power between the worker and his employer, and also because another worker at the site had previously warned of the danger. They thereby overturned the Haifa District Court’s ruling that the worker also shares some of the blame.

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The worker, a Palestinian whose name is under a gag order, was paralyzed from the waist down after falling four stories down the shaft in 2014. He was working in a building at a construction site in Beit Shemesh run by the Stern Group.

“It’s hard to expect a worker to stand up to his employer and refuse to continue working due to dangers of some kind when his daily bread lies in the balance,” Justice Neal Hendel wrote in a verdict issued late last month. Justices Ofer Grosskopf and David Mintz concurred.

Construction workers in Tel Aviv.Hadas Parush

“Work safety regulations weren’t intended to examine whether the worker is complying with their implementation,” Hendel continued. “Therefore, once his employer failed to strictly comply with safety regulations … he should not be allowed to point the finger of blame at the worker for failing to demand this.”

Even though the worker never complained to his managers about the lack of fencing around the elevator shaft, Hendel added, it’s not clear whether he was ever given any training about safety.

The district court had ruled that the company owed the worker some compensation, since it failed to fence off the elevator shaft and provided the worker with no protective equipment. Nevertheless, it added, the worker is guilty of “contributory negligence,” because he had experience in the construction industry in general and with this building site in particular, and therefore knew the shaft wasn’t fenced.

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The lower court’s ruling also cited the worker’s failure to complain about the lack of fencing and the fact that he continued working at the site despite the danger of falling. It set his share of the blame at 15 percent of the total damages.

The Supreme Court agreed that there are times when a worker takes unreasonable risks, or ignores such risks, and thereby contributes to his own injury. But there are also cases in which the worker simply makes a mistake or gets caught up in his work, and that is not sufficient to warrant assigning him a share of the blame, it continued. The current case, it added, belongs in the latter category.

“This is a precedent-setting ruling,” the worker’s lawyers, Uri Gilboa and Amit Uria, said in a statement. “We’re certain that if it reverberates, it will affect change, because the understanding that ordinary workers can’t be blamed for the failures of the employer, who could prevent the accident with a minimal investment, will gradually seep in.”