Opinion ID: 2196917
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: application of close correspondence test

Text: Arguing in support of the statutory classification, the Bureau contends that there is a close correspondence between the agricultural exclusion and the underlying legislative purpose for that exclusion. The Bureau asserts that the Legislature in enacting the agricultural exclusion was concerned with farmers' ability to absorb the costs of workers compensation premiums. Benson considered and rejected any suggestion that farmers are somehow affected to a greater degree than other employers by the cost of workers compensation premiums. See Benson, supra, 283 N.W.2d at 105-106. The owners of small grocery stores, auto repair shops, and other retail businesses are also adversely affected by the cost of workers compensation premiums, but the Legislature did not see fit to exclude them. Article I, Section 21, of the North Dakota Constitution specifically prohibits the granting of privileges to any class which are not granted upon the same terms to all citizens. Any suggestion that agriculture, by its very nature, is to be specially favored [1] through statutory classifications runs directly contrary to that constitutional prohibition. Perhaps more important, however, is the Bureau's singular focus upon the affect of the statute on farm employers. Although this writer joined Justice VandeWalle, as did a majority of the Justices, and I think properly so on the basis of the law and the facts in Bellemare v. Gateway Builders, Inc., 420 N.W.2d 733 (N.D.1988), at least three Justices participating in the instant case should be interested in reading what the dissent had to say: The majority opinion has inverted the analytical instruments for examining such a statute, diminishing the importance of human life and safety and enlarging an unarticulated need for financial tranquility among designers and builders. Hanson began the inspection with a clearer focal point: `While there are economic consequences... underlying the legislation in question, we believe our focus must be on the individuals affected. We are unwilling to view human life and safety as simply a matter of economics. Therefore, we agree ... that the right to recover for personal injuries is an important substantive right. [citation omitted.] We conclude that the appropriate standard of review to be applied ... is the intermediate standard or the close correspondence test.' Hanson, supra, 389 N.W.2d at 325. In Hanson, we could not discern a close correspondence between the statutory classification created for makers of products and the stated legislative goals that would justify unequal treatment of some carelessly injured. Accordingly, we concluded that statute of repose violated Art. I, § 21 of our N.D. Constitution. Bellemare, supra, 420 N.W.2d at 742 (Meschke, J., concurring and dissenting). As noted in Benson, supra, 283 N.W.2d at 106, in resolving this type of equal protection challenge we must focus upon both employer and employee and, although some inequality is permissible, we must balance the benefits against the burdens imposed on each class. In this case we too must balance the denial of a farm worker's right to recover for personal injuries against the financial burdens that workers compensation premiums would place upon farm employers. [2] Balancing those interests in this case, I am unable to discern any close correspondence between the stated legislative goals and the arbitrary classification excluding farm employees. Article I, Section 21 of our Constitution prohibits granting special privileges to farm employers merely because they are engaged in what has traditionally been a favored vocation in this state. Absent a showing that farm employers will be more disparately affected by the cost of workers compensation premiums than similarly situated non-agricultural employers, there can be no valid justification for a legislative classification denying recovery to an entire category of injured workers. The result approved today by the majority will prohibit recovery by a worker injured shoveling grain on a farm, while allowing recovery by a worker injured shoveling gravel on a construction site. I can discern no valid legislative purpose in this record to justify that discrimination. Professor Larson, perhaps the most quoted authority on workers compensation law, has also seriously questioned the various reasons proffered to support the agricultural exclusion: Many reasons, of varying degrees of validity, have been given to explain the agricultural exemption. The only one which seems to have much substance is the practical administrative difficulty that would be encountered by hundreds of thousands of small farmers in handling the necessary records, insurance, and accounting. If this is the reason, it ought to follow that the exemption should be confined to small farmers and not at the same time relieve from compensation responsibility the great fruit, truck, sugarcane, dairy, and wheat farms which have much more in common with industry than with old-fashioned dirt farming. With the exceptions mentioned, based on minimum number of employees or the hazardous or mechanical nature of the employment, this all-important distinction has been largely disregarded in the statutes. Less convincing is the argument that the farmer cannot, like the manufacturer, add his compensation cost to the price of his product and pass it on to the consumer. This might be true if an isolated state attempted compulsory coverage, but if all states extended coverage to farm labor, there would be no competitive disadvantage so far as the domestic market is concerned. As to the disparity between the domestic and world market, that problem already exists, and will not become essentially different because of a slight change in one domestic agricultural cost factor. Least convincing of all is the assertion that farm laborers do not need this kind of protection. Whatever the compensation acts may say, agriculture is one of the most hazardous of all occupations. In 1964, of 4,761,000 agricultural workers, 3,000 were fatally injured, while of 17,259,000 manufacturing employees, the number of fatalities was 2,000. It is important to ask what valid reason lies behind the exemption in order to have some guide in construing the notoriously troublesome terms `farm' and `agriculture.' If, as is here suggested, that reason is one of administrative difficulty, one might expect to find that where the difficulty does not exist, due to the virtual industrialization of the agricultural activity, close questions of definition will be resolved in the direction of compensation coverage. 1C Larson, Workmen's Compensation Law § 53.20 (1993) (Footnote omitted). The Benson majority also considered and rejected the possible legislative purposes for the agricultural exclusion. Benson, supra, 283 N.W.2d at 104-107. The changes which have ensued in the years since 1979 have strengthened the force of the Benson majority opinion. The face of American agriculture has changed, with small family farms increasingly being replaced by larger, more mechanized, and overall more profitable operations. This well-documented transformation has affected agriculture in North Dakota just as it has across the country. The argument that the administrative burdens of complying with workers compensation laws and regulations would be an undue hardship on farm employers is belied by the true nature of modern agriculture. The average farmer today is already familiar with administrative paperwork and dealing with bureaucracy, through endless government programs and regulations. Haney's employer testified that he had to comply with various state and federal laws and regulations, including withholding state and federal income taxes, withholding FICA taxes, and issuing W-2 forms to Haney and the Internal Revenue Service. Any suggestion that farm employers lack the sophistication or business acumen to comply with the requirements of the workers compensation laws is dispelled by the realities of farming in the 1990s. A further dramatic change has occurred in the national overview of workers compensation coverage for agricultural workers. The Benson majority noted that at that time only seventeen states had mandatory coverage for agricultural workers, and expressed some concern that North Dakota farmers would suffer an economic disadvantage if required to pay workers compensation premiums. See Benson, supra, 283 N.W.2d at 105-106. Since that time, there has been an overwhelming trend to include farm workers within mandatory workers compensation coverage, and in the ten years between 1979 and 1989 the number of states providing some degree of coverage for agricultural workers had risen from seventeen to thirty-nine. See 4 Larson, Workmen's Compensation Law, App. A, Table 4, p. A-4-1 (1993). By 1992, forty-five states had some form of compulsory coverage for agricultural workers. Agricultural Workers at Risk, Workers' Compensation Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 4, at 23 (1992). Thus, the argument that mandatory workers compensation coverage would saddle North Dakota farmers with a competitive disadvantage vis-a-vis farmers in other states is far less persuasive now than when it was rejected by the Benson majority in 1979. In this regard, I note Justice Vogel's cogent opinion in Johnson v. Hassett, 217 N.W.2d 771 (N.D.1974), in which this court held that the automobile guest statute was unconstitutional. Justice Vogel painstakingly set out the history of the guest statute, and documented the far-reaching changes in the law and in automobile insurance coverage since passage of the guest statute in 1931. See Johnson, supra, 217 N.W.2d at 772-774, 779-780. Noting that [i]n constitutional law, as in other matters, times change and doctrines change with the times, [ Johnson, supra, 217 N.W.2d at 779], the court held that [c]hanges in circumstances may make irrational a classification which was formerly a rational State purpose. Johnson, supra, 217 N.W.2d at 772, Syll. ¶ 5. See also State v. Quill Corp., 470 N.W.2d 203, 213 (N.D. 1991), rev'd, ___ U.S. ___, 112 S.Ct. 1904, 119 L.Ed.2d 91 (1992) (constitutional law is to be applied in a contemporary context, [i]n light of ... wholesale changes in the social, economic, commercial, and legal arenas). Justice Vogel concluded that the significant changes since passage of the guest statute in 1931 had rendered the statutory classification unreasonable, not based upon justifiable distinctions, arbitrary, and overinclusive. Johnson, supra, 217 N.W.2d at 780. Similarly, I believe the sweeping changes in agriculture since 1979 and the increasing national trend toward mandatory workers compensation coverage for farm workers strengthens the conclusion in Benson that the agricultural exemption does not bear a close correspondence to the legislative purpose of the Act. Chief Justice VandeWalle, in his special concurrence, suggests that legislation and the law need not be logical. However, the essence of equal protection is not logic, but fairness. It is the agricultural exclusion's discriminatory lack of fairness, rather than the illogical nature of the legislative classification, that violates equal protection. Furthermore, if, as Justice Holmes proffered, [t]he life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience, [Holmes, The Common Law 1 (1881) ], then our ongoing experience with the agricultural exclusion leads to the conclusion that, although perhaps justifiable at one time, it now violates equal protection. This court has in the past quoted with approval Justice Cardozo's poetic imagery on the need for growth and change in the law: The inn that shelters for the night is not the journey's end. The law, like the traveler, must be ready for the morrow. It must have a principle of growth. Cardozo, The Growth of the Law 20 (1924), quoted in Lembke v. Unke, 171 N.W.2d 837, 843 (N.D.1969). See also Hastings v. James River Aerie No. 2337, 246 N.W.2d 747, 751 (N.D.1976). I also find significant the legislative history of the agricultural exclusion. On four separate occasions in the 1970s, the Legislature considered bills that would have repealed the exclusion and included most agricultural employment in the definition of hazardous employment under Section 65-01-02, N.D.C.C. See 1977 Senate Bill 2547; 1975 Senate Bill 2034; 1973 Senate Bill 2149; 1971 House Bill 1153. In 1973 and 1975, these bills passed handily in the Senate, only to be killed in the House of Representatives. This legislative action suggests an erosion of the policy bases which may at one time have supported the legislative classification. [3] I find no valid legislative purpose that closely corresponds to the statutory classification embodied in the agricultural exclusion. The exclusion unfairly and unconstitutionally discriminates against agricultural workers, and places severe restrictions upon their right to sure and certain relief that are not placed upon other similarly situated workers in this state. Because I can discern no valid legislative purpose in this record to justify that discrimination, I would hold that the agricultural exclusion violates Article I, Section 21, of the North Dakota Constitution.