Court Opinion

ID: 9614147
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 04:22:55.816309+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:03:34.246853
License: Public Domain

HUNTER, Judge,
dissenting.
Because I would affirm the Full Commission’s holding in this case, I respectfully dissent.
I believe the majority opinion is based on misinterpretations of the relevant statute and case law, expanding the meaning of each to an impermissible and illogical extent. Any more detailed mandates on what may and may not be included in these computations must come from our legislature, not from this Court, and as such remand to the Commission is inappropriate.
I. N.C. Gen. Stat. § 97-2(5)
Here, with irrelevant portions removed, is the statute at issue:
(5) Average Weekly Wages. — [First method:] “Average weekly wages” shall mean the earnings of the injured employee in the employment in which he was working at the time of the injury during the period of 52 weeks immediately preceding the date of the injury .... [Second method:] Where the employment prior to the injury extended over a period of fewer than 52 weeks, the method of dividing the earnings during that period by the number of weeks and parts thereof during which the employee earned wages shall be followed; provided, results fair and just to both parties will be thereby obtained. [Third method:] Where, by reason of a shortness of time during which the employee has been in the employment of his employer or the casual nature or terms of his employment, it is impractical to compute the average weekly wages as above defined, regard shall be had to the average weekly amount which during the 52 weéks previous to the injury was being earned by a person of the same grade and character employed in the same class of employment in the same locality or community.
[Fourth method:] But where for exceptional reasons the foregoing would be unfair, either to the employer or employee, such other method of computing average weekly wages may be resorted to as will most nearly approximate the amount which the injured employee would be earning were it not for the injury.
*490Wherever allowances of any character made to an employee in lieu of wages are specified part of the wage contract, they shall be deemed a part of his earnings.
N.C. Gen. Stat. § 97-2(5) (2005) (emphasis added).4
A. “Unfairness”
The majority opinion makes much of the fact that the statute authorizes the modification of the statutory methods of calculation where unfairness would result. This is a misinterpretation of the plain language of the statute.
The italicized portions of the statute above are the only sections in which “fairness” is discussed. As our Supreme Court has noted, the statute provides an “order of preference” for which method of calculation is to be used, and “the primary method, set forth in the first sentence, is to calculate the total wages of the employee for the fifty-two weeks of the year prior to the date of injury and to divide that sum by fifty-two.” McAninch v. Buncombe County Schools, 347 N.C. 126, 129, 489 S.E.2d 375, 377 (1997). “The final method, as set forth [as the fourth method above], clearly may not be used unless there has been a finding that unjust results would occur by using the previously enumerated methods.” Id. at 130, 489 S.E.2d at 378. Thus, the fourth method — that authorizing modification to prevent an unfair result— is a failsafe option to remedy those exceptional cases where the wage as calculated by one of the first three methods produced a result unfair to either party. That is, it is not a fourth alternative, equal to the others; it is a provision to resort to when to do otherwise would create injustice. It is also not a method for evaluating individual benefits for inclusion in this calculation.
B. Plain language
North Carolina General Statute 97-2(5) does not cover the types of benefits at issue in this case. As defendants note, in 1929, when the North Carolina Workers’ Compensation Act was enacted, the type of pension plans at issue here were almost nonexistent, and none of the ensuing amendments in the many years since have held that employer *491contributions to such plans should be considered “wages” for the purpose of the Act, even though such contributions have been addressed in other statutes. See, e.g., N.C. Gen. Stat. § 96-8(13)(b)(l) (2005) (stating “ ‘[w]ages’ shall not include: 1. Any payment made to, or on behalf of, an employee . . . from or to a trust that qualifies under the conditions set forth in sections 401(a)(1) and (2) of the Internal Revenue Code”). There is nothing in either the statute itself or the case law that supports such an expansion of the law. As the majority notes, many jurisdictions that have considered this question have held that general language in workers’ compensation statutes should not be read to include pension contributions as part of “wages.” See, e.g., Barnett v. Sara Lee Corp., 97 Md. App. 140, 148-50, 627 A.2d 86, 90-91 (holding that “[h]ad it so intended, the Maryland legislature could have specified fringe benefits such as pension contributions within the ‘wages’ definition” and, since it did not, the Court would not expand the definition to include it) cert. denied, 332 Md. 702, 632 A.2d 1207 (1993); Luce v. United Techs. Corp., 247 Conn. 126, 717 A.2d 747 (1998); Antillon v. N.M. State Highway Dep’t, 820 P.2d 436, 440 (N.M. Ct. App. 1991).
The portion oí Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law quoted by the majority bears repeating here:
Workers’ compensation has been in force in the United States for over eighty years, and fringe benefits have been a common feature of American industrial life for most of that period. Millions of compensation benefits have been paid during this time. Whether paid voluntarily or in contested and adjudicated cases, they have always begun with a wage basis calculation that made “wage” mean the “wages” that the worker lives on and not miscellaneous “values” that may or may not someday have a value to him or her depending on a number of uncontrollable contingencies. Before a single court takes it on itself to say, “We now tell you that, although you didn’t know it, you have all been wrongly calculating wage basis in these millions of cases, and so now, after eighty years, we are pleased to announce that we have discovered the true meaning of ‘wage’ that somehow eluded the rest of you for eight decades,” that court would do well to undertake a much more penetrating analysis than is visible in the [Circuit Court opinion in Morrison-Knudsen, reversed by the Supreme Court,] of why this revelation was denied to everyone else for so long.
*4925 Arthur Larson and Lex K. Larson, Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law § 93.01[2][b],'at 93-21 to -22 (2005). Even as it cites to this treatise, the majority opinion runs afoul of its warning. ■
C. Guiding principles
The majority cites to Deese v. Lawn and Tree Expert Co., 306 N.C. 275, 293 S.E.2d 140 (1982), as support for its statement that this Court cannot presume that our legislature intended to exclude all fringe benefits, including those at issue in the case at hand, from the definition of “wages.” This conclusion, however, goes against Deese’s statement of this Court’s guiding principles in this type of interpretation:
This Court has interpreted the statutory provisions of North Carolina’s workers’ compensation law on many occasions. In every instance, we have been wisely guided by several sound rules of statutory construction which bear repeating at the outset here. First, the Workers’ Compensation Act should be liberally construed, whenever appropriate, so that benefits will not be denied upon mere technicalities or strained and narrow interpretations of its provisions. Second, such liberality should not, however, extend beyond the clearly expressed language of those provisions, and our courts may not enlarge the ordinary meaning of the terms used by the legislature or engage in any method of “judicial legislation. ” Third, it is not reasonable to assume that the legislature would leave an important matter regarding the administration of the Act open to inference or speculation; consequently, the judiciary should avoid “ingrafting upon a law something that has been omitted, which [it] believes ought to have been embraced.’’
Id. at 277-78, 293 S.E.2d at 142-43 (citations omitted; alteration in original; emphasis added). The majority’s opinion engages in precisely the type of judicial legislation and “ingrafting upon [the] law” that these principles forbid. The Workers’ Compensation statute makes no mention of the types of benefits at issue here, and it is not the place of this Court to impose on the statute a concept or language that it believes the legislature should have included. As can be seen from the quote above, the only alternative to a basic wage calculation is when certain benefits have been offered “in lieu of wages,” and that portion of the statute has not been put in issue in this case. N.C. Gen. Stat. § 97-2(5). For this Court to hold that the statute does in fact cover a range of other benefits is tantamount to imposing our own language onto the statute.
*493II. Kirk and Morrison-Knudsen
Essentially, here, the majority has taken two cases that exclude fringe benefits — Morrison-Knudsen and Kirk — and cobbled them together to support a holding that the benefits at issue here should not be excluded. An in-depth look at these two cases shows that they do not support the majority’s holding.
A. Morrison-Knudsen
Kirk mentions Morrison-Knudsen briefly, and the majority opinion in this case treats Morrison-Knuden as part of the foundation on which its opinion is built. However, that case dealt with a specific federal statute — the Longshoremen’s and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act, 33 U.S.C. § 902(13) — and the language that the Court closely analyzed was substantially different than that at issue here:
“ ‘Wages’ means the money rate at which the service rendered is recompensed under the contract of hiring in force at the time of the injury, including the reasonable value of board, rent, housing, lodging, or similar advantage received from the employer, and gratuities received in the course of employment from others than the employer.”
Morrison-Knudsen Constr. Co. v. Director, OWCP, 461 U.S. 624, 629, 76 L. Ed. 2d 194, 199 (1983) (quoting 33 U.S.C. § 902(13)). The essence of the Court’s holding was that only benefits similar to “ ‘board, rent, housing, [or] lodging’ ” would be considered part of “ ‘wages’ ” under the statute, and the important quality that those benefits shared were their “present value that can be readily converted into a cash equivalent on the basis of their market values.” Id. at 630, 76 L. Ed. 2d at 199. The Court’s subsequent analysis and elaboration on this point show that this statement does not mean that if a benefit can be easily quantified it should be included; rather, it means that only benefits with some ascertainable present value — as opposed to a future, theoretical value — may be included in this calculation. That is, the types of benefits — compensation for rent or housing, for example — that may be (and frequently are) translated into simple cash payments added on to an employee’s paycheck. These are the kinds of benefits that an employee could in all likelihood choose to have provided to him as a cash payment.
This is not true of the types of benefits at issue in Kirk or in the case at hand. In Kirk, the benefit was the employer’s contribution to a trust fund for the employee’s health insurance; in Morrison-*494Knudsen, it was a union trust fund for a variety of health-related costs, including insurance and disability; here, it is the contribution to pension funds. In neither case could the employee go to the employer and demand that the benefits be ceased and, instead, that the employee begin receiving the benefits’ cash equivalent.
B. Kirk
The majority opinion misconstrues in several ways the holding of Kirk v. State of N.C. Dept. of Correction, 121 N.C. App. 129, 465 S.E.2d 301 (1995), disc. review improvidently allowed, 344 N.C. 624, 476 S.E.2d 105 (1996). Kirk is not, as the majority suggests, a mandate to analyze various benefits on a case-by-case basis to determine whether they can be converted into a cash equivalent, nor does it provide authority for this Court to do so.
In Kirk, this Court was presented with several issues related to a workers’ compensation holding by the Industrial Commission. The last such issue related to whether it was error for the Commission not to include in the weekly wage calculation the amount paid by the State, Kirk’s employer, for his health insurance. Kirk, 121 N.C. App. at 134, 465 S.E.2d at 305. Kirk argued that the Commission erred by making the calculation based on the method outlined by this portion of the statute, which the Court refers to as “method two”:
Where the employment prior to the injury extended over a period of fewer6 than 52 weeks, the method of dividing the earnings during that period by the number of weeks and parts thereof during which the employee earned wages shall be followed; provided, results fair and just to both parties will be thereby obtained.
N.C. Gen. Stat. § 97-2(5). Kirk contended that the Commission should have instead made its calculations based on this provision: “But where for exceptional reasons the foregoing would be unfair, either to the employer or employee, such other method of computing average weekly wages may be resorted to as will most nearly approximate the amount which the injured employee would be earning were it not for the injury.” Id.
This Court held that the latter method “should not be used -unless the result under method two would be unjust.” Kirk, 121 N.C. App. at 135, 465 S.E.2d at 305. As such, the Court concluded, “absent a find*495ing that method two produces an unfair result, the Commission did not err by excluding the State’s contributions to Kirk’s Health Plan in the calculation of Kirk’s average weekly wages.” Id. at 136, 465 S.E.2d at 306.
In Kirk, the Court cited to the United States Supreme Court’s holding in Morrison-Knudsen, 461 U.S. 624, 76 L. Ed. 2d 194, for its reasoning that “wage means ‘the money rate at which service is recompensed under the contract of hiring’ and not ‘fringe benefits that cannot be converted into a cash equivalent.’ ” Kirk, 121 N.C. App. at 136, 465 S.E.2d at 306. The Court then stated “[t]he same reasoning applies in the present case[,]” followed by a holding that no case law
support[s] plaintiff’s position that an unfair result is reached by not including the employer’s contribution to Kirk’s health care. A State employee receives the benefits of the State Health Plan only when needed. The value of this benefit cannot be quantified. After carefully considering the evidence, we cannot say that the Commission’s failure to include such allowance produced an unfair result for the plaintiff.

Id.

This portion of the opinion makes it clear that the ease with which a benefit may be quantified is not the dispositive factor in this issue. The Court did not hold in Kirk that if a court can quantify or value a benefit, it must be included; rather, it says if you cannot quantify the benefit, that is one factor to consider in excluding the benefit from this calculation.
The majority’s statement that “nothing in Kirk suggests that all fringe benefits should be excluded from the average weekly wage computation” is a very misleading summary of that case’s holding. The Court does not consider the question of inclusion for all fringe benefits for the calculation of weekly wages in Kirk. Instead, the Court briefly considers whether the exclusion of a certain type of fringe benefit renders an unfair result under one of the primary statutory methods of calculating wages.
III. Practical Effect
This Court’s engaging in this type of judicial expansion, without the benefit of debate in the legislature as to benefits and drawbacks, will harm those employees not receiving workers’ compensation: Employers will be encouraged to abandon their pension plans due to *496the unanticipated increase in costs this holding would allow. Any general expansion of the types of compensation to be covered by this statute must come from our legislature. At any time, employers and employees as private parties are free to contract for more, than what is required by the statute; that is, if the legislature were to clarify that certain benefits are not covered by the statutory term “wages,” private parties may certainly execute an employment contract providing that, in this employee’s case, such benefits will be considered part of the employee’s wages for purposes of calculating wages under the workers’ compensation statute.
IV. Conclusion
I believe the majority opinion misconstrues the existing law in an attempt to extend it to cover benefits the statute itself does not contemplate. Any further clarification on this issue must come from our legislature, not from this Court ingrafting language upon the statute. Action on our part in the absence of the debate of merits and drawbacks inherent to the legislature will result in an inappropriate and uneven interpretation of this statute. As such, I respectfully dissent.

. As is clear from the language quoted, the statute provides two types of compensation that may be included in a computation of “weekly wages”: (1) wages and (2) compensation received “in lieu of wages.” As the majority notes, plaintiff does not argue to this Court that the benefits .at issue should be considered compensation “in lieu of wages,” and as such, the only way the benefits could be included in this calculation is if we were to consider them included in the term “wages.”

. Kirk was decided based on the 1994 version of this statute; the only difference between that version and the 2005 version at issue in the case here is that the later version uses “fewer” where the earlier version used “less.”