Court Opinion

ID: 9743515
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 21:35:40.616146+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:41.664236
License: Public Domain

MR. JUSTICE GOLDENHERSH, dissenting: I dissent from the majority opinion and would affirm the judgment of the circuit court. The majority has drawn distinctions between this case and Lybrand and Jewel Tea which upon examination of the opinions in those cases prove to be distinctions without differences. In Lybrand, the majority says, there was “substantial employer compulsion” for employees to attend the company picnic. The opinion in Lybrand recites that the employees were encouraged to attend, were paid whether they worked or attended and were not excused from work if they did not attend. Meric Belding, respondent’s president, testified that he asked deceased to join him, Haemker and Carlstedt for dinner and drinks and that he considered it important to know his employees in a “social way” and this gave him the opportunity to get to know Burmeister better. The only reason business was not discussed during dinner is that Meric Belding had an “unwritten rule” against doing so after work in the evenings. Compulsion and the ability to withstand it are of course relative and it is difficult to envision the degree of temerity which Burmeister would be required to exercise to refuse an invitation to have drinks and dinner with the president, vice-president and secretary-treasurer of his employer of one week. In so far as the employer in Jewel Tea received benefit I perceive little if any distinction between the statement of Jewel Tea’s personnel chief that “We felt that anything that drew Jewel people together in a social way promoted cooperation and furthered the joint effort of all of us,” and Belding’s expressed intent to get to know the deceased better in a social informal way because he felt it was important to know his employees in that manner. The record does not support the majority’s statement that the “get-together was not planned” for the purpose of affording the officers the opportunity to get to know Burmeister better. The testimony clearly indicates that even though perhaps not “planned” in the sense that the arrangements were not made in advance, there is no explanation for inviting Burmeister other than to “get to know him better,” a result which the employer deemed beneficial to its interests. The majority’s statement that Burmeister, an employee of one week, “may not have felt entirely free to decline the suggestion” that he have dinner with the three principal officers of his company is certainly a euphemistic description of obvious corporate compulsion. I do not agree with the circuit court that the Industrial Commission erred as a matter of law. An examination of the record, however, shows that the arbitrator for the Industrial Commission reached the correct result and the Commission’s decision, based on the record made before the arbitrator, and reached without hearing additional testimony, is against the manifest weight of the evidence. WARD and DAVIS, JJ., join in this dissent.