Court Opinion

ID: 9852020
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 05:23:11.419551+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:22:21.210312
License: Public Domain

*396Coleman, J.
(dissenting). The Workmen’s Compensation Appeal Board (WCAB) found that Gary McClure was not in the course of his employment, that the contract of employment of the deceased did not place him at the point of peril where his injuries occurred and therefore denied compensation. The per curiam opinion expands both the "premises” and "circumstances of employment” concepts. The expansion leaves us with an open-ended and impractical precedent. I would affirm the WCAB.
Gary McClure, an hourly employee, was hit by an automobile while jaywalking on a street which paralleled defendant’s Fleetwood plant. He was in the midst of an unpaid lunch break and was enroute to a restaurant across the street. The General Motors plant was equipped with a 500-seat cafeteria, lunch wagons and vending machines. However, employees were not under GM control during lunch, so were not required to utilize these facilities. They were free to use their 30-minute unpaid break as they pleased.
The majority, relying principally upon Howard v Detroit, 377 Mich 102; 139 NW2d 677 (1966), and similarly inapposite cases, determined that it was a "circumstance” and an "incident” of the employment relationship that McClure jaywalked toward the restaurant during his lunch break. Reliance upon Howard is misplaced. Implicit in the Howard Court’s opinion is the fact that the irregular nature of a "swing-run” and the resulting "spread time” (nondriving interval) created a situation entirely different from that of a regular driver. Howard was returning from about a five-hour break in employment when his automobile accident occurred. This break was a "circumstance” of his employment as a "swing-run” driver which *397justified the result. Howard v Detroit, supra, 108-110.
While a regular lunch break would not have forced Mr. Howard to leave the terminal, it was unreasonable to expect a person to sit around the terminal for five hours waiting to complete a required day’s work. Therefore, the Court found that the long interval between swing runs was a circumstance of employment which placed him where he was at the time of the accident.
Those facts are far from this case. The union required and the employer supplied accommodations for lunch. There were no extensive time gaps between work periods — only one-half hour. The employee was not "forced” to leave the plant to eat. As noted in the per curiam opinion, there may have been something to eat or drink at the Inn not available in the plant cafeteria and Mr. McClure was free to leave the premises and make his own excursions. GM had no control in the unpaid period over its employees, nor did it have control over the public street and safety measures there.
Mr. McClure’s decision to leave the plant and eat at a place other than that provided (and protected) by defendant was his own. He could have driven to a place well out of the plant area and been injured on a distant street. Many possible combinations of lunch break whims and resultant off-premises injuries come to mind. The imposition of strict liability upon the employer in these situations is not within the purpose of the Workmen’s Compensation Act nor, I submit, anticipated by it.
It is true that we have judicially expanded the act by new definitions and exceptions. It seems unwise, however, for us to expand further into such a conceptually unclear and impractical new area of liability.
*398The WCAB found that Mr. McClure was not acting within or incident to the employment relationship at the time of the accident. I agree. The per curiam opinion catapults virtually all employee activity during any break in the work day, no matter where conducted, into the course of employment relationship. I would not judicially extend workmen’s compensation coverage so far afield.
I would affirm.
Ryan, J., concurred with Coleman, J.