Court Opinion

ID: 9709934
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 03:57:54.493978+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:52.867225
License: Public Domain

Marilyn Kelly, J.
(dissenting.) I respectfully dissent.
I disagree with the majority that Thayer and *466Trask1 control the outcome of this case. Whether these cases still have application in any workers’ compensation case I need not decide. However, they are clearly inapplicable to the facts in the instant case.
In Trask, the injured employee was an auditor and officer manager. She received a salary of $60 per week before her injury. After recovering, she asked to return to her old job. However, due to a change in economic conditions, the job was no longer available. She later found employment with a different employer doing substantially the same work for $30 per week.
The Department of Labor and Industry Commission calculated her partial disability benefits at $30 per week, the difference between her wages when injured and her wages afterwards. The Supreme Court determined that the calculation was improper, since the Commission had made no determination of the "proportionate extent of impairment of her earning capacity in the line of her employment, as of the time of the accident.” Trask v Modern Pattern & Machine Co, 222 Mich 692, 696; 193 NW 830 (1932). The Commission also should have examined changes in wages and general economic conditions before calculating the amount of partial disability benefits. Id., 698.
In Thayer, the Commission found the employee to be partially-disabled but did not specify the amount of the disability award. The Supreme Court recognized that the Commission was required to compute the proportionate extent of the impairment of the employee’s earning capacity as defined in Trask. In Thayer, the employee had returned to the same job in which injured.
Trask has been cited only eight times since it *467was decided in 1923. Thayer has never been cited by any court. None of the cases citing Trask involves a factual situation similar to this case. Here, plaintiff was unable to return to his job due to his disability, and he has not found other employment.
To apply Trask and Thayer to the facts of this case is to require a significant change in the practice of workers’ compensation law. For decades, the Workers’ Compensation Appeal Board (currently the Workers’ Compensation Appellate Commission) has interpreted the Workers’ Disability Compensation Act contrary to the holding in the majority opinion. MCL 418.101 et seq.; MSA 17.237(101) et seq. Courts are required to grant great deference to an agency’s interpretation of the statute it is charged with enforcing, particularly where the statute is ambiguous. Consumers Power Co v Corporation & Securities Comm, 326 Mich 643, 648; 40 NW2d 756 (1950); Tagliavia v Barton Malow Co, 185 Mich App 556, 560; 463 NW2d 116 (1990).
The sections of the Workers’ Disability Compensation Act applicable to this case are ambiguous due to the use of the terms "partial incapacity,”2 "able to earn”3 and "employment.”4 MCL *468418.361(1); MSA 17.237(361X1); MCL 418.371(1); MSA 17.237(371)(1). The terms have multiple meanings. I am not persuaded by the majority that they should be interpreted differently than they have been by the Appeal Board.
The holding in the majority opinion requires opposing experts to testify concerning jobs available within the injured employee’s limitations. It requires the parties to search for an abstract residual wage-earning capacity which will tend to remain at best elusive.
Since Trask and Thayer were decided, the Workers’ Disability Compensation Act has been amended many times. It has added a set-off for wages the employee has actually earned. MCL 418.371(1); MSA 17.237(371)(1). The act’s language has provided employers with a set-off against compensation owed, regardless of the type of employment an injured employee later obtains. MacDonald v Great Lakes Steel Corp, 268 Mich 591, 594-595; 256 NW 558 (1934).
The majority asserts that the creation of the offset neither eliminated the concept of partial disability nor the statutory language on which the standards for determining partial disability were predicated. However, as previously indicated, the concept of partial incapacity is questionable as it relates to this case, and the statutory language is ambiguous.
I am reluctant to apply sixty-seven and seventy-year-old case law interpreting the Workers’ Disability Compensation Act when the act has *469changed so radically since the case law was written. I would defer to the expertise of the Appeal Board and affirm plaintiffs disability award of $153 per week.

 Thayer v Britz, 234 Mich 645; 209 NW 50 (1926), and Trask v Modern Pattern & Machine Co, 222 Mich 692; 193 NW 830 (1923).

 A person can be partially incapacitated or disabled if he is unable to totally perform the job he was doing before he was injured. Or, a person can be partially disabled if there are some types of employment he can do but others he cannot.

 "Able to earn” may be interpreted to mean "actual earnings,” or the wages the employee has the capacity to earn. It may also be limited to the wages the employee is able to earn in the same job in which he was injured, or be expanded to the general "field” of employment.
I was previously on a panel which held that the applicability of § 361 does not hinge on whether the employees actually returned to some form of work. Juneac v ITT Hancock Industries, 181 Mich App 636; 450 NW2d 22 (1989). There, I agreed that "able to earn” includes not only wages actually earned after the injury but also any the employee has the capacity to earn. Id., 641. Due to the difficulty of *468proofs when an employee does not return to work, I now disagree with the Juneac definition and would defer to the expertise of the Appeal Board in defining "able to earn.”

 Employment may mean the "job” at which the employee was working at the time of the injury or the general "field” of employment.