La doctrina judicial en torno al accidente laboral de los teletrabajadores: un ejercicio de extrapolación

Abstract

The progress of ICT is revolutionizing the world of work to unimaginable limits just a couple of decades ago. The consolidation of telecommuting is an irreversible fact, and it is surprising that neither the Remote Work Law, nor the General Social Security Law, nor any other have established specific elements of social protection for this particular type of service provision. This study aims to analyze what is considered the most notable absence in these matters: an adapted concept of occupational accident, given the special nature of its temporal and locative aspects, which already raise various questions. Therefore, judicial doctrine is being forced to resolve by extrapolating the interpretative lines that the Supreme Court has deployed on the accidents suffered by on-site workers. However, as a logical consequence, the question arises of whether all the criteria used to resolve traditional accident cases also apply to the teleworker's home, as a territory excluded from employer control, the work of prevention services, and even Labor Inspection. And, following this thread, it is also worth questioning whether the presumption of work-relatedness, built on the "accident in itinere," the "accident on a mission," or the cardiovascular accident, should be extended to the four walls of the worker's home. Here, therefore, are the answers given by the judicial interpreter to the questions that have already arisen, and for those that have not yet been addressed, we must, for the time being, rely on the conjectures put forward by authors who have studied the topic previously.