D.C. Subway Manager’s Injuries During Two-Hour Break Found Compensable
Quoting Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 21.02, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals vacated a decision of the D.C.’s Compensation Review Board (CRB) that had denied workers’ compensation benefits to a transit authority (WMATA) rail-station manager who sustained injuries when she fell down the steps of a WMATA escalator during a two-hour break between work shifts [Gaines v. D.C. Dept. of Empl. Servs., 2019 D.C. App. LEXIS 246 (June 27, 2019)]. The manager had completed her first shift and decided that she would eat her lunch and rest in a break room available only to WMATA employees. She ascended the escalator to the street level, purchased a soft drink to consume along with her meal, and fell as she was returning down the escalator to the break room located in the area where she would have begun her second shift.
Three Types of Risk
The court initially observed that in determining whether an injury arose out of the employment, the court must examine the origin or cause of the injury. The court added that generally speaking, the risk of injury to a claimant could be brought within three categories: risks distinctly associated with the employment, risks personal to the claimant, and "neutral" risks, i.e., those that had no particular employment or personal character. Again, generally speaking, harms from the first are universally compensable, while those from the second are universally noncompensable. The difficulty lay with neutral risks.
Neutral Risks Utilize Positional Risk Test
As to neutral risks, the D.C. courts have adopted the positional risk test. That is to say that an injury arises out of the employment with regard to neutral risks so long as it would not have happened but for the fact that conditions and obligations of the employment placed the claimant in a position where he or she was injured [parenthetically, this author would add that the District of Columbia is in the minority of jurisdictions that utilize the positional risk test for neutral risks, see Larson, § 4.03].
Injuries at the Workplace
The court continued that under the neutral risk analysis, injuries that occur at the workplace — whether before the start of the day’s work, after the end of the day’s work, or during a break in the middle of the day’s work — are ordinarily compensable even though they are “technically outside the regular hours of employment in the sense that the worker receives no pay for that time and is in no degree under the control of the employer, being free to go where he or she pleases” [Larson, § 21.02]
Did the Manager Present Herself at the Workplace Too Early?
WMATA contended that the Larson rule, just noted, did not apply in the instant case because the station manager here had arrived at her work place some two hours ahead of its beginning point. The court disagreed. It acknowledged that cases could arise in which an employee came to work so early or stayed so late that the employee’s presence at the workplace would be neither reasonable nor foreseeable. Citing cases discussed in Larson, § 21.06, the court said it was unreasonable for the CRB to have concluded that the transit manager’s injuries should be excluded from coverage based on the length of the scheduled break. The court stressed that the manager had a work-related reason for remaining in and around the station. After all, she was to begin a second shift two hours after the end of the first. The court acknowledged that it must ordinarily defer to reasonable conclusions of the CRB. Here, however, the only reasonable conclusion was that the station manager’s injuries were compensable.