Opinion ID: 1961581
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: tort liability to a casual employee

Text: We do, however, find a sufficient basis to sustain tort liability against appellant, although on a basis not clearly articulated below. The facts present us with an employe of an independent contractor standing aside from his vehicle for safety purposes, ordered to do a job outside of his ordinary expertise by the agent of the appellant. Appellee sprang to obey. Why? Because the last time he refused to lend a hand he had been reprimanded and shifted to over-the-road-work for other customers for a while. On this occasion he considered refusal to be impolitic, and did his best to get this damn show on the road as ordered. Here at last we see a casual employment. The appellee engaged in a single, special job, of incidental nature, and his motive was not remuneration. He was a teamster and he operated vehicles for his valuable consideration. His experience was that he would be lectured and perhaps shifted to work that was physically harder and required travel. He assisted the crane operator for the simple motive of avoiding trouble  a motive as trivial as that of the boy in Harns, supra, who undertook to ride the rear of a truck for the fun of it. Casual employment, trivial in nature and not undertaken for valuable consideration does not place the kind of control in an employer that brings with it the responsibility contemplated by the Workmen's Compensation Act. It does, however, leave the employer open to liability under traditional tort principles. Therefore the holding of the lower court that appellee was not an employe of appellant for purposes of the bar of the Workmen's Compensation Act was correct, and we affirm. We turn now to the results of the jury trial in this bifurcated matter, and examine the liability and the damages.