Court Opinion

ID: 9767668
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 05:23:21.871216+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:30:32.327697
License: Public Domain

EAGER, Judge
(dissenting).
I feel compelled to dissent for the sole reason that I do not believe that the employees of the Illinois electrical shop may properly be added to the other employees *632considered, in order to constitute Conner a major employer. The electrical business was a partnership in which Connor and two other persons (wholly unconnected with his other ventures) were interested. Its business was wholly unrelated to the farm and the tavern. I regard the case of Brollier v. Van Alstine, 236 Mo.App. 1233, 163 S.W.2d 109, as distinguishable on its facts; it held, essentially, that an acceptance of the Compensation Act by a partnership was binding upon an individual member who continued to operate the same business after dissolution of the partnership. If the case is not thus distinguishable, I do not agree with the law there declared on this point.
Missouri has adopted the Uniform Partnership Law, Sections 358.010-358.430 RSMo 1949, V.A.M.S. (to which revision further statutory citations will refer). Section 358.150 thereof provides that the liability of partners shall be joint, except for certain debts and obligations not material here. There has been some discussion of the effect of this section when contrasted with section 431.110, providing that all common-law joint contract liabilities shall be construed to be joint and several; and it has been said that the legislature’s action seems to recognize partnership obligations generally as only joint, subject to the right to sue less than all under section 431.140. 15 Mo. Law Review 176, April 1950. But such considerations of a partner’s liability refer primarily to his ultimate substantive liability in contract, and not to the nature of a partnership as a separate entity in Workmen’s Compensation matters. Kalson v. Industrial Commission, 248 Wis. 393, 21 N.W.2d 644. There a partnership was regarded as a separate entity for such purpose. In Toenberg v. Harvey, 235 Minn. 61, 49 N.W.2d 578, 581, it was held that the Uniform Partnership Act treats a partnership as an entity for certain purposes, and that under the Minnesota statute defining an employer as any “person, corporation, copartnership, or association * * * ” a partnership was a legal entity under the Compensation Act. And see the earlier case of Gleason v. Sing, 210 Minn. 253, 297 N.W. 720. Section 287.030 of our Workmen’s Compensation Law provides that the word “employer” is construed to mean: “Every person, partnership, association, corporation, trustee, receiver, * * * using the service of another for pay; * * It seems obvious that our act appears thus to recognize a partnership, as distinguished from its constituent members, as an employing entity. And it thus seems inappropriate to consider our present question as one depending upon the individual liability of a partner for partnership obligations; the mere existence of a sever-able liability for partnership debts is not determinative here. All liability under the Compensation Act arises by virtue of specific contract relationship between an employer and an employee; it is difficult to see how each indvidual partner may properly be considered as an employer in his sole capacity when the real employment contract is with the partnership; and this is true regardless of any ultimate individual liability.
In Fowler v. Brooks, 193 Okl. 580, 146 P.2d 304, 308, the court said: “ * * * in some manner not fully disclosed by the record the defendants below, Rufus Powell and Lewis Pridmore, as individuals, were made parties respondent before the Industrial Commission. As above disclosed, unless they, or either of them, were individually the employer of the plaintiff an award could not have been entered personally or individually against either regardless of whether they were members of the partnership. See Palle v. Industrial Commission of Utah, 79 Utah 47, 7 P.2d 284, 81 A.L.R. 1222.” And see, generally, Buhler v. Maddison, 105 Utah 39, 140 P.2d 933, 937; Coady v. Igo, 91 Conn. 54, 98 A. 328; and 99 C.J.S. Workmen’s Compensation § 42, p. 229, citing the Kalson case, supra. We may take care of any attempted circumvention of the Com*633pensation Act when and if such appears in the future. Here we are considering only bona fide separate businesses.
Missouri has already gone further than the majority of states in aggregating the employees in different businesses of an employer in order to make him a major employer. Larson, Workmen’s Compensation, § 52.33; Harmon v. Rainey, Mo., 306 S.W.2d 469; and it also permits out-state employees to be counted in arriving at the aggregate number. But the writer fails to see the logic of a further extension to be accomplished by holding that employees of a husband and wife in erecting a barn, their employees in a tavern, and the employees of an- electrical partnership in which the husband is merely interested as a partner, are all “employed by the same employer.” That is an essential element. Harmon v. Rainey, supra.
These views would result in an af-firmance of the judgment of the circuit court.