Argentina will end 2025 with an 80% drop in workplace deaths and a 55% decrease in labor accidents, while the number of lawsuits over these issues has surged to a record high of 132,000 cases filed in the year. This trend is driven by the non-compliance of the Judiciary with Law 27.348.
This was stated by Gonzalo Dabini, an expert lawyer in labor litigation, who pointed out that Argentina has a litigation rate 15 times higher than Spain's and 21 times higher than Chile's. This creates "enormous uncertainty" for small and medium-sized enterprises, which are discouraged from hiring more workers.
"Never in history have so many lawsuits been filed with the courts for work-related risks. That is, the greater the incapacity assigned to the worker, the more millionaire the sentence and the higher the percentage that expert takes," commented Dabini of Bulló Abogados.
In this sense, the expert noted that the reform of the Law on Occupational Risks, enacted in 2017, began to be applied partially, as the national and provincial Judicial Powers do not comply with Article 1, which ordered and brought transparency to the system by calling on forensic medical bodies to determine the severity of occupational accidents.
Dabini explained that each lawsuit paid by sentence for a work accident is around 27 million pesos on average in Argentina. "And it's a paradox because the number of accidents and deaths has collapsed," said Dabini in an interview with the DNEWS news channel, after pointing out that the problem lies in the Judiciary's failure to comply with Law 27.348 on Occupational Risks, which was sanctioned by Congress and enacted by the Executive in February 2017, and to which 18 provinces adhered.
That law stipulated that for each demand, a medical-jurisdictional commission should act to professionally determine the disease or contingency of each worker and thus conclude on their incapacity, which would lead to the corresponding monetary benefits to be covered by the Workers' Risk Insurers (ART).
"These commissions or forensic medical bodies were to be made up of specialist doctors called by competition who would charge fees according to their real activity in the lawsuit. But this is not complied with, and there are still experts who go for the results of the lawsuit. The lawyers' fees for the worker and the company, the percentage that the experts keep, and the justice fee should be deducted from the sentence," commented Dabini and specified that the stock of lawsuits for ART reaches 300,000.
Therefore, if the 131,796 lawsuits filed this year were to have a sentence, the experts would be collecting multimillion-dollar commissions on a total of 3.5 trillion pesos, equivalent to about 2.5 billion dollars. The worker does not get a large part of the money dictated by the sentence.
