Court Opinion

ID: 9687008
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 16:13:49.197524+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:18:23.718674
License: Public Domain

OTIS, Justice
(dissenting).
While this 26-year-old employee did suffer a work-related injury on January 11, 1972, while employed by Quality Park, the record indicates that she was able to resume full time work with a different employer by November 14, 1973. She was perfectly capable of performing that job but left it because she was pregnant.
On June 10,1974, she returned to Quality Park and operated a clasp machine on the first shift without any difficulty. In August 1974 she requested and secured a transfer to the second shift, not because of her injury, but for personal reasons.
On the second shift she was assigned a medium operating machine since all the machines using a lighter stock had already been assigned an operator. On September 6,1974, she quit her job entirely, telling her foreman that she was leaving because her fellow employees would not help her move cartons of stock from the floor to a skid. Quality Park’s plant superintendent regarded her termination as voluntary.
It is not a coincidence that the date the employee chose to leave her job on the second shift at Quality Park was the date her attorney and doctor had, several months earlier, arranged her hospitalization to evaluate her permanent partial disability claim.
In early October 1974 she began work at Mackay Envelope Company and then at Lakeland Envelope Company on an “as needed” basis. On at least two occasions she has worked 50-hour weeks, and by her own testimony and that of medical witnesses she was physically able to work full time at the job of clasp machine operator which she had voluntarily left. The compensation judge found that except for the fact the employee remains at home to receive a call from Lakeland offering her part time work, “[tjhere was no testimony as to any other diligent effort to look for work.”
Under these circumstances, I would hold that these awards of temporary total and temporary partial disability payments were improper.