Court Opinion

ID: 9521826
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 02:12:51.40934+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:52:11.199139
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Klingbiel, dissenting: I cannot accept the opinion of the court or the judgment reached thereby. The cause of this accident falls entirely outside the class of causes contemplated by the Workmen’s Compensation Act. In its design to provide compensation for every injury arising out of the employment, regardless of fault, the statute requires that the employer’s operations be instrumental in causing it: that some rational connection be shown between the injury and the work itself. It is not sufficient merely that the employee was present at the place of injury because of his employment. (Borgeson v. Industrial Com. 368 Ill. 188.) The injury must result from some risk peculiar to the work, not a kind of risk to which any other member of the public is also exposed. The test is found in the nature of the risk, not its magnitude; in its incidents, not its incidence; in qualitative factors, not quantitative ones. The idea of the statute is to spread the risk of the employer’s operations, not the risk of any stranger’s negligent or criminal conduct. The fact that the decedent was in the course of his employment — i.e., that the airplane trip was taken in pursuance of employment duties — tells us nothing about causes. If the work of an employee requires his presence in the factory, is an injury compensable which is caused by a bolt of lightning, or by a stray bullet from a nearby hold-up ? If not, how does the fact that his work requires him to be on the street lend occupational causation to injury by a drunken driver ? An arbitrary result gains no force from the fact that citations are made to other arbitrary decisions. To see mere presence at a particular place as the circumstance out of which an injury arises is to adopt the “but-for” theory which any first-year law student can refute. In concluding its exhaustive survey of the law the majority opinion says, in so many words, that the accident arose out of a transportation risk. Assuming the accuracy of the observation, I think that this alone should reveal the lack of connection with the employment. Neither the employee nor the Dunham Company was engaged in the transportation business. There was nothing the employer could do to make safe the conduct of public transportation operations, much less to eliminate the hazards of criminal conduct entirely unrelated to the conduct of either business. (I do not mean to imply that had Jungels been employed by the United Air Lines there would have been a sufficient causal connection with his employment.) I can see little purpose in wordy attempts at providing justification for nonsequiturs, when a mechanical formula determined by working hours is apparently all that is required for compensability. Why not simply ascertain whether the employee was in the course of his employment at the time, award him compensation, and let it go at that? If we cannot save logic let us at least spare the English language. The majority opinion has effectively eliminated the “arising-out-of” requirement, and has put the employer into the insurance business, at least to the extent of working hours. This was not the intent of the statute. (Chicago Hardware Foundry Co. v. Industrial Com. 393 Ill. 294.) We have not yet converted the act of employing another into an absolute guaranty of his safety from any and all the vicissitudes of life. The Borgeson case is a clear and logical determination of a fairly simple question. To overrule it with an opinion like that of the court in this case is to replace reason with nonsense. I would affirm the judgment of the circuit court.