Opinion ID: 3008418
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Legislature’s Chosen Words Dictate the Outcome

Text: The Act’s controlling provisions are straightforward: · “General contractor” : Any “person who undertakes to procure the performance of work or a service, either separately or through the use of subcontractors. The term includes a ‘principal contractor,’ ‘original contractor,’ ‘prime contractor,’ or other analogous term.” [3] · “Subcontractor” : Any “person who contracts with a general contractor to perform all or part of the work or services that the general contractor has undertaken to perform.” [4] · Statutory employer : A general contractor “may enter into a written agreement [with a subcontractor] under which the general contractor provides workers’ compensation” coverage to the subcontractor and the subcontractor’s employees, [5] and such an agreement “makes the general contractor the employer of the subcontractor and the subcontractor’s employees . . . for purposes of the workers’ compensation laws.” [6] · Exclusive remedy : Workers’ compensation benefits are a covered employee’s “exclusive remedy” against an employer for work-related injuries. [7]
There is one building-block principle this Court has declared repeatedly and emphatically: the “surest guide” to what lawmakers intended is what lawmakers enacted. [8] We are interpreting words, and where those words are not doubtful, even though their wisdom may be, we are bound to honor them. Accordingly, since intent is driven by text, we must not accept the peculiar view that construing the Act’s definition of “general contractor” by its terms would subvert legislative intent. [9] Indeed, it is displacing the concreteness of what was actually said with the conjecture of what was allegedly meant that invites activism, a mischievous way for courts to put a finger on the scale (or in the wind) and thus substitute judicial intent for legislative intent. Our place in the constitutional architecture requires fidelity to what lawmakers actually passed. Consequently, we must focus on what a statute says and, just as attentively, on what it does not say, taking care to honor substantive changes, both additions and deletions, made over the years, and always presuming that the Legislature chose its language carefully. [10] As for what the Act includes , its definition of “general contractor” is notable for two things: (1) a solitary description (“undertakes to procure the performance of work”), including a non-exhaustive list of synonyms (“‘principal contractor,’ ‘original contractor,’ ‘prime contractor,’ or other analogous term”); and (2) a solitary exclusion (“a motor carrier that provides a transportation service through the use of an owner operator”). Any entity that falls inside the former and outside the latter is shielded from tort liability if it provides workers’ compensation coverage to its contractors’ employees. As for what the Act excludes , we must give effect to the Legislature’s deletion in 1989 of a provision (“contracted with another party”) that contemplated a general contractor contracting upstream with a premises owner.

The court of appeals held “Entergy did not establish it had undertaken to perform work or services and then subcontracted part of that work to IMC, as a general contractor would have done.” [11] To reach this conclusion, the court relied on Williams v. Brown & Root, Inc. , a 1997 court of appeals decision stating that “[a] general contractor is any person who contracts directly with the owner.” [12] The Williams court reasoned an entity that “did not contract with the owner, but instead was the owner” arguably fell outside the definition. [13] The Williams court, as the Court today notes, [14] committed a fundamental error, disregarding the Labor Code’s specific definition of “general contractor” [15] in favor of a more generic definition. [16] The Legislature often supplies its own dictionary, and where it provides a precise definition, courts must honor that substituted meaning. [17] Importantly, this admonition holds true even if the Legislature’s technical definition departs from the term’s ordinary meaning. [18] So while a general contractor may ordinarily be thought to contract with the premises owner — even though, as the Court observes, an owner serving as its own general contractor is “by no means uncommon” [19] — that construction must give way to the Act’s specific definitions. [20] Contrary to the suggestion in Williams that an owner cannot double as a general contractor because it cannot contract with itself, the statute does not blanketly exclude premises owners who otherwise meet the Act’s undemanding criteria. [21] Nothing in the Act dictates that a premises owner who procures the work and provides the coverage, the only two factors that confer statutory-employer status, lack the same comp-bar immunity granted someone who performs the very same actions but lacks title to the worksite. [22] The legal test for determining whether Entergy can invoke the exclusive-remedy defense is not whether the statute explicitly includes “owners.” The test is a simple one: Does Entergy meet Chapter 406's eligibility criteria? The record shows clearly that Entergy “[undertook] to procure the performance of work” from IMC. [23] Deposition testimony established that Entergy hired IMC to “supplement the Entergy employee workforce” and help perform maintenance, including “water and turbine-related, generator-related work,” at its Sabine plant. Summers’ own summary-judgment response concedes that Entergy “entered into a contract with [IMC] for IMC to perform various maintenance work at Entergy’s plant in Bridge City, Texas.” Entergy undeniably “ under[ took] to procure the performance of work,” thus meeting the Act’s broad definition, and because it also provided the workers’ compensation policy under which Summers recovered, Entergy is his statutory employer.
The court of appeals in this case (and the Williams court) also erred in relying on Wilkerson v. Monsanto Co. , a federal district court decision holding that a premises owner cannot be a statutory employer (because it cannot be a general contractor). [24] Here, too, the mistake concerns a misused statutory definition. Wilkerson , unlike today’s case, was governed by the pre-1989 definition of “subcontractor”: “a person who has contracted to perform all or any part of the work or services which a prime contractor has contracted with another party to perform.” [25] The Wilkerson court interpreted “contracted with another party” to mean the prime contractor and premises owner must be distinct entities. [26] The court said this phrase, the law from 1983 until 1989, [27] meant a general contractor was necessarily an intermediary that contracts both upstream with the premises owner and downstream with the subcontractor. As the owner’s contracts in Wilkerson were all downstream, he could not be a statutory employer. [28] Assuming Wilkerson was correctly decided, it lacks any interpretive force today, for a simple reason: Wilkerson turned entirely on four words the Legislature removed during its 1989 substantive rewrite. [29] Here are the pre- and post-overhaul definitions that, construed together, control our decision: prime/general contractor subcontractor pre-1989 “the person who has undertaken to procure the performance of work or services” and “‘prime contractor’ includes ‘principal contractor,’ ‘original contractor,’ or ‘general contractor’ as those terms are commonly used” [30] “a person who has contracted to perform all or any part of the work or services which a prime contractor has contracted with another party to perform” [31] current “ a person who undertakes to procure the performance of work or a service . . . . The term includes a ‘principal contractor,’ ‘original contractor,’ ‘prime contractor,’ or other analogous term. The term does not include a motor carrier that provides a transportation service through the use of an owner operator” [32] “a person who contracts with a general contractor to perform all or part of the work or services that the general contractor has undertaken to perform” [33] key change current definition excludes a single class of otherwise eligible persons: certain motor carriers, nobody else current definition no longer imposes an “upstream contract” condition on general contractors As seen above, the 1989 reform bill deleted “contracted with another party,” the critical upstream-contract phrase that anchored Wilkerson and suggested a premises owner could not wear the hat of general contractor. The before-and-after comparison is difficult to brush aside. While the 1983-1989 Act indicated that a contractor undertook action on behalf of someone else (the owner), the Legislature in 1989 removed that upstream inference. Our cases require us to treat such omissions as meaningful and not meaningless, [34] a principle even more prudent when deletions occur, as here, within a substantive overhaul that constitutes the lone piece of legislation that lawmakers are considering. [35] Wilkerson remains instructive only to underscore that statutory construction must honor statutory definitions. Summers urges a construction rooted in now-repealed language. While conceding that “contracted with another party” appears nowhere in the current statute, Summers insists the upstream-contract notion was not deleted but transplanted, subsumed now by the phrase “undertakes to procure” in the definition of “general contractor.” This contention — that the upstream-contract condition was moved but not removed — is facially counterfactual, betrayed by this inconvenient truth: “ undertake[ ] to procure” also appeared in the pre-1989 definition. Even though this phrase predated the 1989 overhaul, Summers argues it became implicitly freighted with what was once explicitly stated (in a different definition). This argument is unpersuasive. Updated criteria require updated analysis. It is untenable that the four words so important in Wilkerson were, though deleted, imported into three words that predated Wilkerson . Summers’ argument would reinsert what lawmakers took out and declare this part of a massive modernization bill — the part that anchors the precedent upon which Summers relies most — wholly nonsubstantive and merely aesthetic. [36] We cannot treat the upstream-contract language in the 1983-1989 Act as mere surplusage and its 1989 deletion a nullity. Nor does the dissent pivot on Summers ’ argument that “undertakes to procure” necessarily implies an upstream obligation and must be read as “undertakes to procure for someone else .” The deletion of something explicit means more than the retention of something implicit. Indeed, several Texas statutes use “undertake” to describe a person acting to benefit himself. [37] More to the point, when lawmakers have in mind an entity doing something on another’s behalf, they have no difficulty saying so explicitly, often using “undertakes” in tandem with clear third-party language like “for another person.” [38] In such instances, including elsewhere in the Labor Code, the Legislature has done more than imply a third-party obligation; it has stated one outright, something lawmakers in 1989 did not do, instead choosing to scrap preexisting third-party language. [39] The Act as written bars Summers’ claim, and it merits mention that even certain counsel supporting Summers concede the statutory text can be read in Entergy’s favor: “Based on statutory language alone, reasonable persons may differ on whether a premises owner may also act as a general contractor in the procurement of work and provision of workers’ compensation coverage, thus receiving the exclusive remedy protection from third party actions.” [40] Thus, we are directed to arguments that look beyond the statute itself.