Exclusiveness of right to compensation. The rights and remedies herein granted to an employee or the employee's dependents on account of a work injury suffered by the employee shall exclude all other liability of the employer to the employee, the employee's legal representative, spouse, dependents, next of kin, or anyone else entitled to recover damages from the employer, at common law or otherwise, on account of the injury. Under the dual capacity doctrine an employer apparently protected by the exclusive liability principle may become liable to the employee in tort if, in respect to that tort, he occupies a position which places upon him obligations independent and distinct from his role as an employer. In California, it has been severely limited by legislative enactment. In Illinois, the employer is required to also exist as a separate legal entity.
Most jurisdictions reject it as fundamentally unsound.
See Billy v. Consolidated Mach. To do so might undermine extensively the policy sought to be achieved by the workmen's compensation act. There are endlessly imaginable situations in which an employer might owe duties to the general public, or to non-employees, the breach of which would be asserted to avoid the exclusive liability provision in our statute. It would be an enormous, and perhaps illusory, task to draw a principled line of distinction between those situations in which the employee could sue and those in which he could not. The exclusive liability provision would, in any event, lose much of its effectiveness, and the workmen's compensation system as a whole might be destabilized.