Court Opinion

ID: 9741329
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 20:53:43.82151+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:23.110091
License: Public Domain

O’Connor, J.
(concurring). The plaintiff and the defendant were employed at a Papa Gino’s restaurant. The defendant was employed as a cook. When the plaintiff was injured in the restaurant parking lot, the defendant was also in the lot. However, the defendant had not been scheduled to work and had not worked that day. Instead, according to his deposition testimony, his reasons for being at the restaurant were to watch television and to observe the cashing-out procedure followed by the restaurant managers. His purpose in observ*414ing the cashing-out procedure was to gain knowledge that might help him to become a manager some day.
I agree with the court that the defendant is not entitled to summary judgment and that the judgment must be reversed. The defendant’s purpose for being at the restaurant when the plaintiff was injured is an essential component of his coemployee immunity defense, and the plaintiff cannot properly be foreclosed from litigating that matter. As the Appeals Court said, 35 Mass. App. Ct. 800, 804 (1994), “Where a party’s motive or state of mind is at issue, summary judgment is rarely appropriate.”
I write separately only to express my disagreement with the court in one important respect. The court states its agreement with the Appeals Court that, if the defendant had been on the restaurant property “solely with the bona fide and reasonable job-related purpose of upgrading his job skills and his .employer knowing of it did not discourage such activity, he would have been acting within the course of his employment and entitled to coemployee immunity.” Ante at 411. It is obvious from the context that the “job-related purpose of upgrading his job skills” to which the court refers is the defendant’s objective of acquiring familiarity with a managerial job, a job other than the one he was employed to do. There is, of course, no suggestion by anyone that the defendant’s objective also was to upgrade his cooking skills. It is clear, then, that the court is of the view that an employee, who goes onto his employer’s property for the sole purpose of preparing himself for a job which he has not been employed to do, is acting in the course of his employment for workers’ compensation benefit purposes, in addition to coemployee immunity purposes, if his employer failed to discourage the practice after learning of it. The result is that an employee who is injured in such circumstances may be entitled to workers’ compensation benefits despite the fact that the employee was serving his own interests and none of his employer’s.
I would agree that an employee, who goes onto his employer’s property with his employer’s permission to make observations for the purpose of improving his performance of *415the job he was employed to do, would be acting in the course of his employment. I would agree, too, that an employee, who acts in response to his employer’s express or implicit encouragement to go onto the property to acquire information about other jobs, would be acting in the course of his employment. It is a very different proposition, however, and one with which I do not agree, to say that an employee acts in the course of his employment if he goes onto his employer’s property to serve an interest of the employee alone and the employer, aware of the employee’s interest but not sharing it, fails to discourage that conduct. The court cites no case, and I am aware of none, that supports such an unfair proposition.
The defendant’s deposition testimony establishes, favorably to the plaintiff, that neither of the defendant’s purposes for being on his employer’s property was related to cooking, which was the job he was employed to do. Furthermore, the defendant has not established for summary judgment purposes that he was explicitly or implicitly encouraged by his employer to be on the employer’s premises to observe cashing-out procedures. In my view, that is a second reason why the summary judgment for the defendant that was entered in the Superior Court should be reversed.