Verbal safety instructions are insufficient to exempt the employer from liability

Court of Cassation, November 13^th, 2025, n°24-10.858

An employee is responsible for manually transporting waste from one skip to another, while an external service provider is responsible for emptying the skips.

On 15 December 2019, while the external contractor was absent and unavailable, the on-call agent and the technical manager verbally instructed the employee not to manually unload the metal scraps on her own.

The employee did not comply with the verbal instructions given to her and suffered an accident at work while manually transporting scrap metal from one skip to another on her own.

She brought a claim before the Court of Justice for recognition of inexcusable fault.

The Court of Justice dismissed her claim.

The Nîmes Court of Appeal upheld the judgment, finding that :

• the employer was aware of the danger to which the victim was exposed,

• did not justify the implementation of a specific procedure to compensate for the possible failure of the external service provider responsible for emptying the waste skips, did not draw the legal consequences,

• nevertheless, the on-call agent and the technical manager had verbally instructed the employee not to unload the scrap metal manually and alone, so that the employer could not have anticipated that she would decide ‘on her own initiative’ to disregard these instructions.

The employee appealed to the Court of Cassation.

In its ruling of 13 November 2025, the Court of Cassation overturned and quashed the appeal ruling and agreed with the employee’s reasoning, noting that:

• on the one hand, a breach of the employer’s duty of care towards the employee constitutes gross negligence ‘when the employer was or should have been aware of the danger to which the employee was exposed and failed to take the necessary measures to protect them’,

• and on the other hand, it is irrelevant whether the employer’s fault was the determining cause of the accident.

In this case, it is not disputed that the employer was aware of the danger, nor that safety instructions existed (although they were only verbal).

On the other hand, the Court of Cassation considers that “the verbal instructions given were insufficient to ensure compliance ” (Cass. 2nd civ., 13 November 2025, no. 24-10.858), so that, although the employee may have contributed to her accident by disregarding these instructions, the employer was nonetheless at fault.

In this decision, the Court of Cassation ruled not so much on the existence or otherwise of safety instructions, but on the inadequacy of verbal safety instructions, in the presence of a danger known to the employer, to ensure the safety of employees.