Court Opinion

ID: 9571514
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 20:32:20.154501+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:30:32.086851
License: Public Domain

*144•Dethmers, J.
(concurring). I concur with Mr. Justice Sharpe in reversal for the reason that there is no evidence in the record of disablement. As noted in Justice Sharpe’s opinion, plaintiff’s attorney stated on the record that plaintiff “has no real medical disability,”' thus distinguishing this case factually from Kadykowski v. Briggs Manufacturing Co., 304 Mich 503, in which the plaintiff claimed and the commission found that he had a physical disability, viz., a hernia, and we found that there was competent evidence to support such finding. In like manner this case is distinguishable from Stewart v. Lakey Foundry & Machine Co., 311 Mich 463, and Allen v. National Twist Drill & Tool Co., 324 Mich 660, in both of which there were findings, supported by competent evidence, of physical disability consisting in the one case of pneumoconiosis and silicosis in the other, due to which plaintiffs therein were advised by doctors that they could not safely return to their previous employment.
The workmen’s compensation law provides for compensation for disablements, not merely for conditions, not disabling, which employers may consider undesirable in their employees. In this connection it is to be observed that when, in Hood v. Wyandotte Oil & Fat Co., 272 Mich 190, we spoke of an injury as compensable because it isolated the employee from employment we were speaking of an injury which had physically disabled the employee from performing manual labor, in which he had been engaged when the injury occurred. The case is not to be considered authority for the proposition that a nondisabling condition arising out of or due to causes and conditions characteristic of and peculiar to a specific employment is compensable merely because it has the effect of isolating the employee from employment due to aversions or objections by employers or fellow employees. In that connection it *145must be noted that despite language to that effect in a headnote to our opinion in Flanigan v. Reo Motors, Inc., 300 Mich 359, we did not hold that a nondisabling physical condition was compensable because it led to the employee’s discharge due to objections to such condition by fellow employees. On the contrary, we held the plaintiff therein entitled to compensation because his disease, dermatitis venenata, “was such that he might well have claimed he was physically unable” and because “There is ample testimony to support the findings of the department that dermatitis venenata disabled plaintiff from earning full wages in the work at which he was last employed.”
Boyles, C. J., and North and Carr, JJ., concurred with Dethmers, J.