Court Opinion

ID: 9721399
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 08:58:16.044225+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:24:25.493110
License: Public Domain

Mr. JUSTICE RYAN, concurring: I concur in the opinion of the court. However, I wish to again suggest that a new approach be adopted for determining, in cases such as this, whether the claimant is an employee or an independent contractor. In Kirkwood v. Industrial Com. (1981), 84 Ill. 2d 14, following Professor Larson’s suggestion, we stated that the right to control the work may not be the most relevant factor in determining if a worker is an employee in a worker’s compensation case. It may be more important to consider the nature of the claimant’s work in relation to the regular business of the employer. (1C A. Larson, Workmen’s Compensation §§43.42, 43.50, at 8 — 16 to 8 — 17 (1980).) I take the liberty of quoting at length, as we did in Kirkwood, Professor Larson’s explanation of this approach: “The theory of compensation legislation is that the cost of all industrial accidents should be borne by the consumer as a part of the cost of the product. It follows that any worker whose services form a regular and continuing part of the cost of that product, and whose method of operation is not such an independent business that it forms in itself a separate route through which his own costs of industrial accident can be channelled, is within the presumptive area of intended protection.” 1C A. Larson, Workmen’s Compensation §43.51, at 8 — 17 to 8 — 18 (1980). In section 43.52, under the heading of “Relativity as essential part of test,” Professor Larson states: “Note that the factor here stressed is in two parts: the nature of the claimant’s work, and its relation to the employer’s work. The nature of the claimant’s work, in the abstract, is seldom a safe guide in itself, and for this reason it is dangerous to rely on precedents classified solely by the character of the worker’s job — for example, to say that window-washers are usually held to be employees while lawyers are usually held to be independent contractors. If I, as a private householder, call upon a window-washing company and engage it to do what amounts to one day’s work on my house, I am probably not an employer. But an industrial plant which at regular intervals keeps this same company busy doing what otherwise would be done through its own employees could be held an employer. Similarly, when I seek the services of a lawyer, on the occasion of one of my rare encounters with the legal process, the lawyer is obviously not my employee. But the same lawyer, engaged continuously by a law firm or insurance company, can be an employee. This test, then, which for brevity will be called the ‘relative nature of the work’ test, contains these ingredients: the character of the claimant’s work or business — how skilled it is, how much of a separate calling or enterprise it is, to what extent it may be expected to carry its own accident burden and so on — and its relation to the employer’s business, that is, how much it is a regular part of the employer’s regular work, whether it is continuous or intermittent, and whether the duration is sufficient to amount to the hiiing of continuing services as distinguished from contracting for the completion of a particular job.” 1C A. Larson, Workmen’s Compensation § 43.52, at 8 — 19 to 8 — 20 (1980). In Kirkwood we refused to abandon the right-to-control test in favor of the relative-nature-of-the-work test for the practical reasons therein stated. Also in that case, as in this, the briefs had not urged or considered the advantages and disadvantages of the two approaches. I would welcome an opportunity to consider a case in which the briefs thoroughly analyze the comparative merits of the two approaches.