Court Opinion

ID: 9735262
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 18:07:01.87238+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:56.374020
License: Public Domain

MESCHKE, Justice,
dissenting.
I respectfully join in former Chief Justice Erickstad’s dissent, and add a reason or two.
The majority recognizes that “agricultural work is hazardous,” but rationalizes the exclusion of injured agricultural wage workers from sure and certain relief for a reason unstated by the legislature: To exempt agricultural employers from the expense of the system. That says too much. In my view, that economic justification is a wealth-based classification that discriminates against a po*213litically powerless and unorganized underclass of farm laborers.
This underinclusion improperly grants privileges and immunities upon terms not granted to all hazardously employed citizens in violation of the N.D. Const, art. I, § 21:
[N]or shall any citizen or class of citizens be granted privileges or immunities which upon the same terms shall not be granted to all citizens.
The times that formed workers’ compensation legislation have faded from the judicial memory:
The law [of industrial accidents] was wildly nonuniform, full of “unpardonable differences and distinctions.” This meant that, by 1900, the [fellow-servant] rule had lost some of its reason for being. It was no longer an efficient device for disposing of accident claims. It did not have the courage of its cruelty, nor the strength to be humane. It satisfied neither capital nor labor. It siphoned millions of dollars into the hands of lawyers, court systems, administrators, insurers, claims adjusters. Companies spent and spent, yet did not buy industrial harmony—and not enough of the dollars flowed to the injured workmen. At the turn of the [twentieth] century, rumblings were already heard of the movement that led to a workmen’s compensation plan.
Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, p. 484 (2d ed. 1985). Friedman concludes: “For all its failings, workmen’s compensation has achieved its basic aims.” Id. at 683-84. Still, he recognizes a serious failing.
[W]hite-eollar and service workers now outnumber blue-collar workers in the labor force. It is now their law, their piece of the welfare state. Since the nation has yet to adopt a general security law, cradle to grave, piecemeal bits accrue to existing institutions or are captured by “special-interest groups.” Liability under compensation laws can be looked at in this light.
Friedman at 688. In my view, the exclusion that benefits politically powerful special interests at the expense of sure and certain relief for an economically weak class of wage workers, is a wealth-based classification, and, is therefore unconstitutional. •
“All laws of a general nature shall have a uniform operation.” N.D. Const, art. I, § 22. Legislative classifications based on wealth, like ones on race, are “suspect” classifications that justify the heightened judicial scrutiny set out in Surrogate Judge Erickstad’s dissent. State v. Carpenter, 801 N.W.2d 106, 110 (N.D.1980) (“While indigency is not a ‘suspect classification’ at the present time, we believe that the combination of the classification based upon wealth and the vital interests of [an individual] at stake in a criminal prosecution require an intermediate standard of review.”). See also Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663, 668, 86 S.Ct. 1079, 1082, 16 L.Ed.2d 169 (1966) (“Lines drawn on the basis of wealth or property, like those of race ..., are traditionally disfavored.”). While the United States Supreme Court has waltzed away from vigorous intervention on behalf of the poor, see Laurence H. Tribe, American Constitutional Law, § 16-52 (“Decline But Not Demise of Judicial Intervention on Behalf of the Poor: Minimal Protection of The Laws”), pp. 1653-1659 (2d ed. 1988), “the state may not actively go about dividing people into different economic classes.” Id. at 1658. See Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202, 102 S.Ct. 2382, 72 L.Ed.2d 786 (1982) (denial of free enrollment to the children of illegal aliens violates equal protection); Zobel v. Williams, 457 U.S. 55, 59, 102 S.Ct. 2309, 2312, 72 L.Ed.2d 672 (1982) (policy of distributing dividends from the state’s mineral income fund to state residents on the basis of time lived in Alaska violates equal protection by creating “fixed, permanent distinctions between an ever-increasing number of perpetual classes”). A large segment of farm laborers in this state are migrant workers, not residents, and virtually all farm wage workers survive only paycheck to paycheck.
“Underinclusive classifications do not include all who are similarly situated with respect to a rule, and thereby burden less than would be logical to achieve the intended government end.” Tribe, American Constitutional Law, p. 1447. See State v. Fischer, 349 N.W.2d 16, 18 (N.D.1984) (“The declaration of part of a law as unconstitutional does *214not require the court to declare the entire law invalid unless all provisions are so connected and dependent upon each other that one can conclude that the Legislature intended the law to take effect in its entirety or not at all.”). See also Smith v. Cahoon, 283 U.S. 553, 557, 567, 51 S.Ct. 582, 583, 587, 75 L.Ed. 1264 (1931) (invalidating exemption of “company engaged exclusively in the transporting [of] agricultural, horticultural, dairy or other farm products and ... [f]ish” from state regulation of transportation companies “designed to safeguard the public with respect to the use of the highways”); Williams v. Vermont, 472 U.S. 14, 105 S.Ct. 2465, 86 L.Ed.2d 11 (1985) (overturning an automobile use tax that gave credit for out-of-state tax payments only to car registrants who were Vermont residents at the time the out-of-state tax was paid). I believe that the North Dakota workers’ compensation system is unconstitutionally underinclusive by excluding the wealth-based class of injured agricultural wage workers.
In my opinion, the exclusion is unconstitutional.