Court Opinion

ID: 9744278
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 21:59:06.969705+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:48.142840
License: Public Domain

NEAL, Presiding Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the majority opinion as it is a correct application of controlling case law interpreting the statute. I respectfully believe, however, the results of those cases are in error and my views coincide with Judge Ratliff's views expressed in his concurring opinion in Lovely v. Cooper Industrial Products, (1981) Ind.App., 429 N.E.2d 274. I shall state my views without further re-examination of the already discussed authorities.
Prior to workmen's compensation laws, tort doctrine, hedged with concepts of fault, negligence, contributing negligence, fellow-servant rules, and assumed or incurred risk, governed an employee's right to compensation for injuries. These tort doctrines were deemed unsatisfactory to protect the worker in this industrial age because of the difficulty in proving a claim. Thus, the worker and his family suffered want and privation when his earnings were terminated because of injury. Humanitarian in its purpose, the workmen's compensation act provided compensation to the injured employee without regard to tort concepts. The cost was to be spread throughout the industry and ultimately to the consumer. While the act became the employee's exclusive remedy, it abolished tort concepts involving fault and provided "compensation for personal injury or death by accident arising out of and in the course of the employment." IND.CODE Sec. 22-8-2-2.
However, the choice of the words "by accident'" by the legislature was unfortunate, for the courts early on resurrected the ghosts of the interred tort concepts and developed the phrase "unlooked for mishap or untoward event not expected or designed" to define "by accident". Calhoun v. Hillenbrand Industries, Inc., (1978) 269 Ind. 507, 510-11, 381 N.E.2d 1242, 1244. More recent cases have attempted to ameliorate that definition with the phrase "unexpected results". The phrase seems to imply, and the cases seem to hold, that if an employee is injured by certain innate and predictable hazards of the employment, he will not be compensated. It implies that the injury must come as a surprise. The economic burden to the injured worker and his family is not lightened by the distinction of whether his injury was looked for, unlooked for, expected or unexpected, or designed, even though the purpose of the act is relief from want and privation. Similarly, disability may be caused by ongoing stressful employment that ultimately incapacitates the worker. The phrase is an unnecessary and artificial engraftment upon the statute.
*689The only relevant inquiry should be whether the injury or disability resulted from the employment or, in the words of the statute, arose out of and in the course of the employment. The means, unless self-induced, is not material A worker should be compensated for injuries which are an intrinsic and predictable hazard of the employment and disability induced over a course of time as well as injuries which are "unlooked for mishap or untoward event not expected or designed". In my opinion, the act contemplates that result. The rulings of the courts, or the statute itself, should be changed to reflect that end.