Opinion ID: 3013105
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Description of the Coverage Test

Text: The 1972 amendments to the Longshore and Harbor Workers Compensation Act created a “two-part test ‘looking both to the “situs” of the injury and the “status” of the injured,’ to determine eligibility for compensation.” Rock, 953 F.2d at 60 (quoting Northeast Marine Terminal Co. v. Caputo, 432 U.S. 249, 265 (1977)). Because Congress 3. The Director, Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs, a respondent in this case, filed a motion to dismiss Maher’s petition for review, claiming that this court lacks jurisdiction to hear this appeal because the Board’s decision was not a “final order” within the meaning of 33 U.S.C. § 921(c). We will deny this motion because although the Board remanded the case to the ALJ for further consideration, there was nothing more for the ALJ to decide in light of the parties’ stipulation resolving all issues except for the legal question of coverage. Because the Board’s order was “for all purposes final by the time this court was called upon to consider the petition,” we have jurisdiction under the Act. Sea-Land Serv., Inc. v. Director, OWCP, 540 F.2d 629, 631 n.1 (3d Cir. 1976). 7 included a broad geographical area in the “situs” component of the test, including both injuries on water and areas on land that are connected to maritime activity, it limited the persons who fulfill the “status” test to those who “engaged in maritime employment.” 33 U.S.C. § 902(3). The Act defines such persons as: any longshoreman or other person engaged in longshoring operations, and any harbor-worker including a ship repairman, shipbuilder, and shipbreaker, but such term does not include — (A) individuals employed exclusively to perform office clerical, secretarial, security, or data processing work; Id. We noted in Rock that this definition of “maritime employment” is rather imprecise, but that Congress “came closest to defining this key term in the ‘typical example’ of the expanded coverage set forth in the legislative history.” 953 F.2d at 60. The legislative history explains: The intent of the Committee is to permit a uniform compensation system to apply to employees who would otherwise be covered for part of their activity. To take a typical example, cargo, whether in break bulk or containerized form, is typically unloaded from the ship and immediately transported to a storage or holding area on the pier, wharf, or terminal adjoining navigable waters. The employees who perform this work would be covered under the bill for injuries sustained by them over the navigable waters or on the adjoining land area. . . . [E]mployees whose responsibility is only to pick up stored cargo for further transshipment would not be covered, nor would purely clerical employees whose jobs do not require them to participate in the loading or unloading of cargo. However, checkers, for example, who are directly involved in the loading or unloading functions are covered by the new amendment. H.R. Rep. No. 92-1441, 92d Cong., 2d Sess. 10-11 (1972), reprinted in 1972 U.S.C.C.A.N. 4698, 4708. In its decision in Caputo, supra, the Supreme Court read the “typical example” in the legislative history quoted above 8 as indicating Congress’s intent “to cover those workers involved in the essential elements of unloading a vessel— taking cargo out of the hold, moving it away from the ship’s side, and carrying it immediately to a storage or holding area.” 432 U.S. at 267. In contrast, “the example also makes it clear that persons who are on the situs but are not engaged in the overall process of loading and unloading vessels are not covered.” Caputo, 432 U.S. at 267; see also Chesapeake and O.R. Co. v. Schwalb, 493 U.S. 40, 46 (1989) (stating that the coverage test for “land-based work other than longshoring and the other occupations named in § 902(3) is an occupational test focusing on loading and unloading”). Importantly, the Caputo Court specifically rejected the “moment of injury” principle, in which the coverage analysis depended on the task that the employee was engaged in at the time of the injury. Rather, the Court held that “when Congress said it wanted to cover ‘longshoremen,’ it had in mind persons whose employment is such that they spend at least some of their time in indisputably longshoring operations and who, without the 1972 amendments, would be covered for only part of their activity.” 432 U.S. at 273. The Court emphasized this point again in P.C. Pfeiffer Co. v. Ford, 444 U.S. 69, 81 (1979), when it stated that “[a] worker responsible for some portion of that (longshoring) activity is as much an integral part of the process of loading or unloading a ship as a person who participates in the entire process.” In Rock, supra, we explained the Court’s interpretation of the Act as seeking “to avoid ‘shifting coverage’ . . . by extending coverage to an employee who throughout the day might have been assigned to unload a vessel but at the hour of the accident had been temporarily assigned a task that might not have been covered under the Act.” 953 F.2d at 63. Although the Supreme Court’s decisions indicate a rather liberal analysis of the extent of coverage, we held in Rock that there is a limit to those covered by the Act. In that case, the claimant had been employed for several years as a longshoreman, but eventually decided to work solely as a courtesy van driver, a choice he was entitled to by virtue of his seniority. The claimant worked solely in this function 9 for two years before the date of his injury, which occurred during the course of his job as a driver. We determined that this type of employment was not covered under the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Act because a courtesy van driver is not “an essential element or ingredient of the loading or unloading process.” 953 F.2d at 67. Although we noted that the claimant was officially subject to reassignment as a longshoreman, we declined to grant him coverage for that reason alone because we did not think that the “shifting coverage” aspect of Caputo applied. We explained: The [Caputo] holding cannot be stretched to cover Rock, who voluntarily chose a position that would no longer involve him in the dangers of loading and unloading, and whose only occupation in the two years in which he held his new job was to drive the courtesy van. [Caputo] protects those employees who walk in and out of coverage on a frequent basis, not those who are nominally subject to reassignment. Id. at 67 n.17.