Contributory Negligence and Damages

We have now looked at the employer’s common law duties towards his employees with regard to their safety, his statutory duties and his vicarious liability. All of them, somewhere along the line, involve ‘fault’ on the part of the employer or someone for whom he is responsible. It follows, then, that he should be responsible for compensating an injured workman only to the extent that he is at ‘fault’. Any part of the injuries caused by the workman himself are the workman’s own responsibility. The law recognises this by the concept of contributory negligence. An injured person’s damages are to be scaled down by the amount which he himself is to blame for the accident. This position is a result of the Law Reform (Contributory Negligence) Act, 1945. It is not proposed to deal with this in detail; suffice it to say that, depending on the degree of fault of the plaintiff, his damages may be reduced by anything up to 100 per cent.