Court Opinion

ID: 9559080
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 17:22:16.862146+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:09:47.302667
License: Public Domain

WARNER, J.,
dissenting.
I am of the opinion that the overall purpose of § 102-1732, OCLA (ORS 656.128) is to enable employers and officers of corporations who are not work*532men in fact to enjoy the beneficent privileges of the compensation law and that a corporation officer who has already achieved the status of a workman in fact does not need to qualify further under the provisions of that section as a “deemed workman”.
In the instant matter the record reveals that Carl D. Allen, the decedent, had been regularly retained as a workman at a stipulated salary of $350 per month to perform services that were not incident but foreign to his work as a corporation officer. Payments had been made to the Commission predicated upon this workman relationship. We also learn from the record that his duties as a vice president and later as president of the corporation took less than one per cent of his time and that the rest of his time was employed as a workman in fact, hired by and subject to the direction and control of the corporation.
To require him to make a further application to come under the Workmen’s Compensation Law would have been a vain gesture, accomplishing no more than previously done. To now deny its benefits to his dependents would, in my opinion, be a perversion of the clear legislative intent and would work a cruel and unjust hardship. It tends to the absurd to say that one who has previously qualified as a “workman” in .fact should thereafter be required to implement procedures to be “deemed a workman”.
Rossman and Tooze, JJ., join in this dissent.