NS subsidiary not liable for health damage caused by Chromium 6 paint

NS subsidiary NedTrain is not liable for alleged health damage caused by exposure to chromium-6 paint, the court in Den Bosch ruled on Tuesday. According to the court, the claimants did not individually substantiate that their health problems originated from working with the carcinogen-containing paint.

Between 2004 and 2012, more than 800 welfare recipients refurbished old trains in an NS workplace in Tilburg as part of a reintegration project. Years later it was revealed that chromium 6 may have been present in the paint these workers scoured from the trains. Many of those involved have since been struggling with health problems. In 2019, a committee investigated the matter and concluded that Tilburg and NedTrain were liable.

In this case, 30 former workers demanded compensation from NedTrain, the NS subsidiary that managed the project. They said they suffered health damage due to the restoration work on old train sets painted with chromium-6 containing paint.

According to the court, the workers expressly filed their claims as individuals, not as a collective action, but they did not submit individual substantiation. “They explained their claims with general statements and deliberately not with evidence per individual. They, therefore, submitted to the court an anonymized list containing a global overview of the work that was carried out for Nedtrain at the time and the health complaints that exist among this group.”

The court ruled that this was not enough to grant their claims. “Given the individual approach to the claims, each employee should have substantiated the report in which he worked at NedTrain, what specific work he performed there, and what health complaints he suffers from. The health complaints of each individual should then have been substantiated with medical documents. Because they did not do so, their claims must be dismissed,” the court said.