The Occupational Risk Prevention Regulations establishes a series of mandatory measures and recommendations to maintain the Safety of work environmentsand forcing companies to adopt measures of protection for your employees. Adequate clothing, helmets, gloves, protective footwear, etc.
However, what happens when what causes physical damage is the continued use of screens in the workplace? That is the situation that a public employee In 2021. The Social 1 Court of Mieres, in Asturias, has responded to the lawsuit forcing the Asturian administration to take care of the Cost of graduated glassesopening the door to future demands of other employees in the same situation.
What happened? As extracted from the sentence to which Xataka has had access, the affected person is a work worker of the Principality who performed maintenance assistant at the Sports Center of El Cristo in Oviedo. In 2021, the center digitized the access control system, so the employee increased the use of screens in his job.
As a result of the use of screens, the employee began to present visual discomfort that before the change did not suffer affecting his visual acuity in the use of the screens. In 2024, the employee asked the Principality of Asturias for an ophthalmological review and the provision of new glasses adequate if the recognition recommended it. The autonomous administration ignored both “leaving it without answer,” says the sentence.
In January 2025, on behalf of the employee, the legal service of the USIPA-SAIF union He filed a lawsuit against the Principality claiming the application of European directives and The sentences of the Court of Justice of the European Union.
The protagonist: Directive 90/270. In his sentence, the Mieres Court forces the Principality of Asturias to provide or cover the cost of glasses to a public employee to need them to work with screens, in compliance with article 9 sections 1, 2 and 3 of the European Directive 90/270on minimal safety and health provisions for work.
This European directive complements community regulations through a series of minimum provisions common to all EU countries. In the aforementioned article 9, the eye protection measures and the view of the workers are established. Specifically, “if you experience visual difficulties that may be due to work with the screen.” Under this article the right to ophthalmological reviews is collected, and forces employers to provide employees with “special corrective apparatus appropriate to the work in question”.
A pioneer sentence. The sentence recognizes the employee the relevance of the application of that 90/270 directive and the European jurisprudence with a Judgment issued in Italy where this right is also recognized that employers must provide special corrective devices (such as glasses) if medical recognitions justify them.
The sentence distinguishes between “normal corrective devices” (general use, out of work) and “special corrective devices” (specifically necessary For tasks with screens), putting the focus in the latter, since the employee only reported “visual acuity disorders that had been diagnosed, however, it is incumbent at the aforementioned jurisdictional body to verify whether the graduated glasses in question effectively serve to correct view disorders related to their work and not general view problems.”
Thus, the sentence fails in favor of the employee forcing the administration of the Principality of Asturias “to be carried out an ophthalmological medical examination, (…) as well as that they are given with graduated glasses if they were prescribed by said option as necessary to perform their daily work in front of the computer screen or reimburse them The expenses of its acquisition“, is specified in the sentence.
Why is the sentence important? The application of these regulations by the Mieres Social Court feels a precedent in the prevention of occupational hazards, normalizing the ocular protection of those employees who are exposed to long days in front of screens without the equivalent of protection to a helmet in the case of workers or gloves for a carpenter.
Maria Guadalupe Lorenzo, lawyer of the Legal Service of the Usipa-Saif Union of Asturias that has led this case, says that “from our union we are already formulating claims of the future extensions of effects to this sentence for the labor personnel who are in a similar situation, as well as claims for the official personnel and other affiliated workers. There will be multiple claims and surely more sentences in this regard.” The sentence is firm because the Principality has not appealed, so its application is immediate.
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