Court Opinion

ID: 9623943
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 06:46:45.218862+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:51:44.550597
License: Public Domain

HALLEY, J.
(dissenting). From the passage of the Workmen’s Compensation statute in 1915 down to the present day, our Legislature has not seen fit to bring retail mercantile establishments under its provisions, and this court has so held in a number of decisions, among which are Veazey Drug Co. v. Bruza, 169 Okla. 418; Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. v. McHan, 162 Okla. 8, 18 P. 2d 875; Rorabaugh-Brown Dry Goods Co. v. Mathews, 162 Okla. 283, 20 P. 2d 141. There is no question here but that the petitioner, Dalton Barnard Hardware Company was a retail hardware and furniture store. The majority opinion brings them under the Workmen’s Compensation Act because they sewed slip covers and draperies on an ordinary sewing machine on a balcony in the store. If this constitutes a workshop, of course, petitioner is liable. If it does not, the award should be vacated. Under section 2, Title 85, O.S. 1941, the employments which come under the Workmen’s Compensation Act are listed as follows:
“Factories, cotton gins, mills and workshops where machinery is used;
And further:
“. . . wholesale mercantile establishments. . . .”
This shows clearly that retail establishments were not included, as we have held. In section 3, subparagraph 11, the Legislature has defined a “workshop” as follows:
“ ‘Workshop’ means any premises, yard, plant, room or place wherein power-driven machinery is employed and manual or mechanical labor is exercised by way of trade for gain or otherwise, or incidental to the process of making, altering, repairing, printing, or ornamenting, cleaning, finishing, or adopting for sale or otherwise, any article, or part of article, machine, or thing over which premises, room or place the employer of t-he person working therein has the right of access or control.”
*273We have construed these provisions in several cases. In Southwestern Grocery Co. v. State Industrial Commission et al., 85 Okla. 248, 205 P. 929, we held that a retail grocery store did not come under the Act as to an employee who was working in the meat department, which had an electric sausage grinder in it. In that case the claimant was cleaning chickens when he cut himself with a knife. In the case at bar the claimant was a saleslady whose duties were not confined to the sewing machine, and she was not injured while using the sewing machine. In Sims v. St. Anthony Hospital et al., 180 Okla. 385, 69 P. 2d 1040, in a case where the claimant was injured while loading a garbage can onto a truck after having cleaned an electric dish-washing machine at the hospital, we said:
“We are of the opinion, and hold, that the fact that there was an electric dish-washing machine in the kitchen of the hospital did not constitute it under the law a workshop where machinery was used.”
In Plaza Grill et al. v. Webster et al., 182 Okla. 533, 78 P. 2d 818, we held that a restaurant was not covered by the Workmen’s Compensation Act, and that ordinary kitchen appliances, including a carbonator, a mixing machine with an attachment to grind meat, and a meat slicing machine, all operated by electric motors, did not transform a kitchen into a “workshop”, under the Act, so as to put liability on the owner for an injury sustained by an employee. We also held in Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. et al. v. McHan, supra, that an electric coffee grinder and an electric meat grinder did not make a retail grocery store a workshop.
In Hurley v. O’Brien et al., 192 Okla. 490, 137 P. 2d 592, we hold that the presence and use of an electric sausage grinder and an electric meat slicer did not transform the meat department of a retail grocery and meat market into a “workshop where machinery is used”. This case overruled the earlier case of Sunshine Food Stores v. Moorehead, 153 Okla. 301, 5 P. 2d 1066, which held that a meat market was a workshop where a power-driven meat grinder was used and that employee therein was covered though not injured by the meat grinder.
The majority opinion relies upon the case of Harbour-Longmire-Pace Co. v. State Industrial Commission, 147 Okla. 207, 296 P. 456. Without discussing the soundness of that decision, I say that the case at bar is distinguishable from it. In Harbour-Longmire case it was a retail furniture store, but they repaired and upholstered furniture, new and repossessed, using a large foot-powered Singer sewing machine, and in the repair department used an electrically-operated paint gun. I question the soundness of that decision; and certainly the rule laid down therein should not be extended any further. As was said in Hurley v. O’Brien et al., supra:
“. . . In the Harbour-Longmire-Pace Co. v. State Industrial Commission case, supra, we had the situation where a separate business was set up and being operated in connection with the retail business rather than the presence of equipment which was incidental to the real business of the retail store.”
No such situation exists in this case, as the sewing of slip covers and draperies was an integral part of the furniture business in which petitioners were engaged. The effort of the majority opinion to distinguish between the case at bar and Hurley v. O’Brien by saying that an electric sausage grinder and meat slicer in the meat department of a retail grocery store was incidental to the business, while an ordinary electric sewing machine used in a hardware and furniture store to sew slip covers and draperies was not, is fallacious.
Under the majority opinion, every department of a retail store which has and uses a sewing machine becomes ipso facto a workshop. In my humble opinion, the Legislature never intended such and did not say it.
I dissent.