Facts
This judgment concerns the determination of the disability income of an insured person who can no longer work in their previous occupation due to health impairments. The Federal Court had to decide how to determine the insured person's reasonable residual earning capacity.
The insured person had suffered a health impairment and could only perform light auxiliary work due to disturbances in fine motor skills and coordination of the right-sided extremities. Since he had not taken up a new occupation, the disability income should be determined based on table wages.
Previously, the Federal Insurance Court had used the October wage survey of the Federal Office for Industry, Commerce and Labor for this purpose. However, this survey was replaced in 1994 by the Swiss Wage Structure Survey (LSE) of the Federal Statistical Office, which is to be published every two years in the future.
Considerations
The Federal Court states that for the income comparison to determine the disability income, the statistics of standardized gross wages (table group A) should be used, with the median (central value) in each case, rather than the statistics of actual net wages.
According to table A 1.1.1 of the 1994 LSE, the central value for men in the private sector employed in simple and repetitive tasks (requirement level 4) with a weekly working time of 40 hours was 4,127 francs. Assuming a standard average working time of 41.9 hours,…