The cleaning of the vehicle windows before starting work and before driving to the duty station does not, in purely legal terms, interrupt the commute. This was decided by the Hamburg Social Court in the concrete case of a baker. A baker injured his finger after cleaning his car windows before driving to work, because he had tripped over the bristle edge, and applied to his accident insurance fund for a commute accident under Paragraph 8 Abs. 2 Nr. 1 SGB VII. The accident coverage, however, was rejected, as
the fall would not lie within the protection scope of the commute accident insurance. The accident would belong at most to general employee insurance, the accident insurance fund said.
The court ruling
The Hamburg Social Court (SG Hamburg) nevertheless recognized the finger fracture as a commute accident (Az: S 40 U 140/23 D). For the commute accident insurance protection under Paragraph 8 Abs. 2 Nr. 1 SGB VII to apply, it requires that the insured main activity and the traversal of the path be linked, the court reasoned. And
that is the case if the path is connected with the start or end of the main activity.
However, there must be a substantive connection between the insured activity and the task leading to the accident, the Hamburg Social Court further explained. Thus insured are activities such as scraping ice in winter or cleaning the windows before setting off.
Baker was allowed to clean the windows
Thereby the act of walking from the front door to the vehicle and the subsequent inspection of the vehicle windows and their cleaning,
in order to be able to complete the commute safely, constitutes a unified action of the insured preparatory action within the meaning of Paragraph 8 Abs. 2 Nr. 1 SGB VII.
According to the Hamburg Social Court there was no interruption in the insured path because the entire process took only a short time and did not correspond to any substantially different activity from a non-insured area. Thus, there was ultimately no interruption of the commute, and the entire sequence up to the baker's finger fracture was insured, the
