Personal injury advice from
Thompsons Solicitors
Where Women Must Pay a Premium to Work at Home
31st January 2005
ITALIAN wives, it seems, are more likely to injure themselves in the course of household duties than most, but an attempt to protect them from the perils of kitchen equipment by providing obligatory insurance has been condemned as a stealth tax.
Under a law that comes into full force today, the first of its kind in Europe, housewives aged between 18 and 65 in Italy are obliged to pay €13 (£9) a year. The law also applies to maids and cleaners.
Italian officials said that fewer than two million of Italy’s estimated six million housewives had joined the scheme. This might be explained by the complication of the cover on offer: you have to do a lot of damage and provide reams of proof to make a claim. “Basically, you have to lose an arm or a leg to qualify,” Aduc, the Italian consumer organisation, said.
“If you cut off all the fingers of one hand, you might get something, but if you cut off one finger with a kitchen knife you probably won’t get a euro.”
It said that nearly 40 per cent of accidents in the home were the result of incorrect use of equipment or failure to read instructions properly.
The four million uninsured face a statutory annual fine of €26, backdated to 2001, but Marida Bolognesi, a left-wing MP, said that it was unclear how the authorities intended to track down housewives who evaded the payments.
“Are they going to tap phones or knock on doors? The whole law needs rethinking,” she said.
The law came into force four years ago, but only now is being backed by sanctions. It is the brainchild of the main housewives’ associations in Italy, Confcasalinghe and Federcasalinghe. Federica Rossi Gasparrini, head of Federcasalinghe, said that the original aim had been to win legal and social recognition of domestic work as labour.
“The idea was that a woman’s work would have greater value, with divorce court rulings or accident awards reflecting recognition of her contribution to the family’s finances,” Signora Gasparrini said. In reality, however, the insurance contribution risked being seen as just another tax.
To win compensation, claimants have to prove that the accident occurred while they were carrying out a domestic task. “It is not enough to say you slipped on the floor, you have to prove you were mopping or hoovering it at the time,” one Italian official said.
The premium is paid to the state-run National Institute for Insurance against Accidents at Work. The State pays the premium in households where the annual income is below €9,296 a year. Signora Gasparrini said that of the 3,000 claims made since 2001, the institute had paid out in only 107 cases.
There are three million domestic accidents a year in Italy, resulting in 8,500 deaths. One in ten of the accidents involves hospital treatment. The law provides for payment of up to €1,000 a month for permanent invalidity, with a scale of payments for accidents incurring at least 33 per cent disability.
The insurance does not provide for minor accidents, death, the elderly or, according to Alessandra Egidi, of Confcasalinghe, the small number of Italian “househusbands ”.
Copyright © Times Online – Story Filed by Richard Owen – 31st January 2005
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