Court Opinion

ID: 9727702
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 13:48:25.788331+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:25:41.764503
License: Public Domain

DISSENTING OPINION BY
SENIOR JUDGE FLAHERTY.
Lionel Plowden’s working conditions were so abnormal that justice calls for the orders of the Workers’ Compensation Judge (WGJ) and the Workers’ Compensation Appeal Board (WCAB)(affirming the WCJ) to be affirmed by this Court. I do, therefore, respectfully dissent from the majority opinion.
This case does not involve a police officer or a firefighter who first undergoes rigorous mental and physical preparation and training at a professional academy before being assigned the hazardous duties to which they have eagerly volunteered to engage.
Here, we have the equivalent of an untrained, non-combatant personnel clerk, hired in the City’s intake office to help disadvantaged people get into a job-training program that will, hopefully, provide them with employment. Lionel’s duties for almost the entire first year of his employment consisted of filing records, payroll duties, customer service, administering tests, and answering questions.
Then, without any training, mental conditioning, lecturing, warnings, etc., Lionel is then plucked from the safety and security of the intake office and involuntarily selected for the apparently hurriedly created Mayor’s Task Force on Youth Violence, which has the laudable objective of serving the “hundred baddest kids” in the City while given the responsibility of ensuring that these “kids” were eligible to work. Lionel’s piece of that responsibility required him to go into their neighborhood, to transport these youths to obtain employment documents and, presumably, to transport them back into the “neighborhood.”
The City provided Lionel with no preparation, physical or mental conditioning or training for this Task Force position into which he was thrust. The scenario is so ludicrous that it didn’t even dawn on Lionel that he was transporting gang members until one of his passengers bragged to him about the extent of his criminal background.
During his first assigned month on the Mayor’s Task Force on Youth violence, *88Lionel was intimidated by the appearance of a car full of youths while he was waiting for a bus.
Another time, Lionel felt two unknown individuals who were following him after work. He then received threatening phone calls for not telling gang members that he was transporting them to tests where they would have to undergo urinalysis, causing Lionel to reasonably fear that he would be unjustifiably harmed by the misapprehensions of gang members suspecting him to be luring them into a law enforcement sting operation.
The majority feels that merely increasing stress or creating potential danger like this on a new job is not sufficient to support a finding of abnormal working conditions. I would agree if he had been properly trained, conditioned and possibly, educated, armed or protected before being sent into the field, but not when he was needlessly exposed to. such dangers while being sent into the gangland workplace in a totally defenseless condition. The whole scenario could be scripted for a Hollywood comedy if the consequences were not so tragic. The proof of the abnormality is that after a perfectly normal one-year performance as an intake clerk, Lionel has a complete mental breakdown after only one month as an untrained, unprepared member of the Task Force.
I agree with the WCJ:
First and foremost, [the] judge finds that the claimant testified persuasively and credibly that he was subjected to working with some of the City’s most dangerous and violent youth. This in itself is enough to warrant the label of an “abnormal working condition” for a ' civilian employee, which the claimant was ...
[The] judge accepts as credible that once the claimant became aware of the violent and criminal backgrounds of the youth he worked with, he became concerned with his own welfare. This information, alone or combined with the threatening phone calls and being followed, would be enough to cause any normal human being to become paranoid and “fearful” for his life. To have to work in an atmosphere where one is fearful for one’s life cannot be a normal working condition, especially when one’s normal original job was to perform clerical duties.
(WCJ’s Op., Findings of Fact Nos. 10 & 11 at 13).
The majority reasoning is skewed:
Furthermore, it is well established that psychological injury cases are highly fact-sensitive and for work conditions to be considered abnormal, they must be considered in the context of the specific employment. [Citations omitted]. Thus, Plowden’s work conditions as a Clerk II must be evaluated in the context of his specific employment, which was a Clerk II assigned to work with the Task Force, assisting potentially violent youth in obtaining employment ...
Majority Opinion, p. 7.
It is evident that the reasoning of the majority begins logically when on one hand, it acknowledges that Lionel was merely a Clerk II clerical worker and then becomes skewed as it nonchalantly includes the abnormal expectation of Lionel, “being assigned to work with the Task Force, assisting potentially violent youth in obtaining employment ...” as just another run-of-the-mill duty assigned to clerical workers in the course of their personnel employment. Without background for or training in this position, to have an expectation that a mere clerk would be expected to catapult himself into the highly dangerous nature of the work is ludicrous on its face. And, in fact, the WCJ made credibil*89ity findings supporting such a conclusion that Lionel’s working conditions were abnormal. The Board agreed.
For this court to now reweigh the credibility findings of the WCJ and WCAB to find that such an outrageous condition was not abnormal, seems abnormal.
I go beyond the WCJ and the Board and declare that the lack of pre-conditioning, orientation, basic training, and the complete lack of safety procedures to protect this clerical worker are prima facie abnormal working conditions in this specific employment situation.
The WCJ and the Board should be affirmed.