Court Opinion

ID: 9472306
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:56:07.493924+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:42:51.491338
License: Public Domain

TATE, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
I respectfully dissent.
The effect of the majority opinion is to hold that a Texas employee, by settling his Texas Workers’ Compensation claim against his employer, likewise extinguishes any tort cause of action he may have against an electrical utility for his wrongful death or injury caused by a high voltage electrical line. The basis for the majority’s holding is a section of the Texas Public Utilities Act that entitled the utility to indemnification from the employer for permitting the deceased employee to work in proximity to ineffectively guarded high-voltage electrical lines, and its purported result in combination with compensation settlement (including a routine hold harmless indemnification) executed by the decedent’s survivors with his employer.
With deference for the views of the majority, the result reached, although not illogical, flouts the intent of both public utility and worker-compensation statutes to provide, through economic disincentive, protection of workers injured at work by reasons of hazards posed by high-voltage electrical lines.
The majority relies upon Houston Lighting & Power Co. v. Eller Outdoor Advertising Co. of Texas, 635 S.W.2d 133 (Tex. App.1982), writ ref d n.r.e., a decision I find distinguishable and inapposite. This decision concerned a suit by a utility against an employer to be indemnified, by reason of the Public Utility Act, for the tort recovery against it on behalf of the worker’s survivors. There, the Texas intermediate court held that a provision of the Texas Workers’ Compensation Act — that protected the employer against indemnification of third persons for their tort liability to an employee — did not bar this suit by the utility. The reasoning of the court was that the clear intent of the subsequently enacted Public Utilities Act provision “was to hold an employer liable for violations of the Public Utilities Act” and that this construction was “most consistent in protecting workers in this state, and in assuring that employers will follow minimum statutory requirements while performing work near hazardous high voltage lines.” 635 S.W.2d at 135 (emphasis added).
Contrary to this legislative intent, the majority holds that, by the settlement with the employer of an electrocuted employee’s workers’ compensation claim, both the public utility and the employer are immunized from liability for their joint negligence (in the utility creating a high-voltage hazard and in the employer permitting its workers to work near an ineffectively guarded high-voltage line). Dissenting, I would hold, in view of this statutory construction and these statutory purposes, that the Public Utilities Act conferred upon the utility a statutory right to indemnification from the employer for high-voltage hazards permitted by the employer, but that — especially in view of the strong Texas public policy disfavoring indemnity for a party’s own negligence, see, e.g., Eastman Kodak Company v. Exxon Corporation, 603 S.W.2d 208 (Tex.1980)1 — the worker-survivors’ compensation settlement and agreement to indemnify the employer against other claims cannot be construed as constituting an agreement by the employee’s survivors to indemnify the employer for claims brought against it for its own negligence per se by statutory violation (of a provision designed to protect the employee) of the Texas Public Utility Act.
I respectfully dissent.

. Unlike the majority, I am unable to find, either from the Public Utility Act or from the two or three Texas intermediate decisions relied upon by the majority, any legislative intent that the Act intended to make an exception to this general principle. Nor can any functional or policy reason be ascribed for its so doing.