Court Opinion

ID: 9714818
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 05:46:13.406911+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:23:28.826498
License: Public Domain

NICHOLS, Justice,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent. I cannot join today’s majority in affirming the decision of the Appellate Division of the Workers’ Compensation Commission because the provisions of 39 M.R.S.A. § 55 (Pamph.1979-84) make “weekly wages, earnings or salary which he is able to earn thereafter” an element in computing the compensation for partial incapacity to which a worker may be entitled, and because in the case before us the factfinder has not specifically found the post-injury earning capacity of Phillippe J.A. Lagasse.
Lacking a finding on this key element in the computation, the Appellate Division implicitly, and in a footnote this Court explicitly, treated Lagasse’s wages from week to week at American Messenger Service as *1121the full measure of his ability to earn after his injury. It may have been that amount, and it may have been more.
Often a worker’s actual post-injury earnings may indicate the full extent of his ability to earn, Fecteau v. Rich Vale Construction, Inc., 349 A.2d 163, 165 (Me.1975), but such is not always the case. Severy v. S.D. Warren Co., 402 A.2d 53, 55 (Me.1979). The evidence of what a worker later earned is “a useful indicator, not a talisman.” Id. See 2 Larson, Workmen’s Compensation Law § 57.2 at 10-76 n. 42 (1983).
Moreover, when Hannaford Brothers Company seasonably filed a motion for findings of fact and conclusions of law, it then became incumbent upon the hearing commissioner to make specific factual findings to enable the Law Court “to determine whether competent evidence supports the Commission’s decision and whether its decree is based either upon a misapprehension of fact or a misapplication of law to the facts.” Dufault v. Midland-Ross of Canada, Ltd., 380 A.2d 200, 203 (Me.1977). Still the commissioner did not fill this void.
From the circumstance that the parties may seem to be in agreement as to the several factors to be inserted into the formula it does not follow that the computation becomes merely “a ministerial matter.” By delegation of the task to staff the Commission evades its own responsibility, proclaimed in the directive of 39 M.R.S.A. § 99, to find the facts specially.
The order of the Appellate Division should, therefore, be vacated, and the case should be remanded for the discharge of this quasi-judicial duty, not by its clerical staff, but by the tribunal itself.