Court Opinion

ID: 9547624
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 17:49:50.075038+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:17:54.443358
License: Public Domain

BISTLINE, Justice
dissenting.
The legal conclusions of the Industrial Commission are not substantiated by the findings of fact nor the record. Thus, I would remand to the Commission for further consideration.
I.
The Commission states that Mr. Goolsby was fired because of misconduct and cites two reasons: (1) that he had not left for work in time to be at his first appointment by 8:00 a.m.; and (2) that he had failed to notify his superiors that he was ill. Both reasons ignore uncontested, uncontradicted, and non-conflicting evidence before the Commission.1
First, on the days in question in which Mr. Goolsby was allegedly home in violation of company policy — November 12 and 13, 1981 — Mr. Goolsby’s normal routine and sales procedure had been cancelled. On those two days, Mr. Goolsby’s sales *460district was involved in a sales “blitz.” During this “blitz” no regular 8:00 to 5:00 work schedule was in place. Rather, Mr. Goolsby and the other sales persons were instructed to work only on retail and wholesale accounts. Accordingly, since the 8:00 to 5:00 rule was not in effect, the fact that Mr. Goolsby was at his home after 8:00 a.m. on the days in question does not rise to the level of intentional or willful disregard of the employer’s interests. Nor can this be construed as a deliberate violation of the employer’s rules.
Second, Mr. Goolsby did not call his employer to inform him that he was sick or otherwise unable to do his work because he did not consider himself sick. Mr. Goolsby considered himself only delayed in beginning his work day. He asserted that he had intended to put in a full day in accomplishing the objectives of the sales “blitz” as soon as the sweating ended.
The facts demonstrate that Mr. Goolsby was not dismissed during a normal work week. Furthermore, the employer failed to show that Mr. Goolsby would not work an eight-hour day on the days in question, nor that he could not accomplish the directive of the sales “blitz” campaign. The Commission's decision is apparently based upon the assumption that the days in question were ordinary work days and that Mr. Goolsby was required to call the company if he needed to deviate from the normal, pre-set planned work schedule. Since these assumptions are incorrect, any reliance upon them results in a decision unsubstantiated in the record. Accordingly, I would reverse the Commission’s decision.
II.
The procedural history of this case highlights the inadequacy of Idaho’s process for determining unemployment questions. Mr. Goolsby’s claim was allowed three times by various appeals examiners in the Department of Employment. It was not until seventeen months after the last appeal within the Department of Employment, and twenty months from when Mr. Goolsby first was awarded unemployment benefits, that the Commission entered the picture refinding the facts and redetermining Mr. Goolsby's claim. It is now over one year since the Commission rendered its decision and 35 months since Mr. Goolsby found himself among the unemployed.
I.C. § 72-1368 outlines the appellate procedure for unemployment claims. In essence, it provides for five successive levels a claimant must endure in pursuing an unemployment claim. First, a claims examiner makes an ex parte determination whether a claimant is eligible for benefits. That decision can be appealed by a disgruntled party’s request for redetermination. The claims examiner then reviews the ease, refinds the facts, and issues a decision. That decision can be appealed to an appeals examiner who not only reviews evidence already presented but can hear new evidence in affirming, modifying, or reversing the claims examiner’s decision. That decision can then be appealed to the Industrial Commission. The Commission can also elect to hear new evidence and make its own findings of fact. Finally, that decision can be appealed to this Court.2 Unlike the other appeals stages, this Court will not hear new evidence and issue its own findings of fact, but is not bound by the conclusions reached during the lower levels.
I seriously wonder as to the value received, if any, in prolonging these claims by involving the Commission and in turn this Court. The Commission, undoubtedly pressed to the utmost in attending to the work for which it was created, i.e., industrial injury and occupational disease cases, is now content to make most of its unemployment decisions on the cold record sent up to it by the Department of Employment— or at best utilizes a cold record tailored for it by one of its referees — certainly a procedure which was not a general practice in earlier days. Booth v. City of Burley, 99 Idaho 229, 580 P.2d 75 (1978), emasculated any meaningful involvement on the part of this Court. Hence, I see little in these two final stages which enhances the purposes *461of the Act, providing nothing, in fact, except delay and increased legal expenses. Where a claimant is denied benefits, but ultimately prevails, it is to be much doubted that he still has the need for the benefits which the law wanted to be his on becoming unemployed.
There is no additional or supplemental expertise that members of the Commission have that the Department of Employment appeals examiners do not have which would justify keeping the Commission in the act. Contrary to what is true in industrial injury cases, the expertise of the Commissioners is no factor at all in its function as a review board in unemployment cases. There is no present justification for not accepting the final Department of Employment determination as final, and taking only pure questions of law first to a district court, and ultimately to this Court. Idaho’s present system has become archaic in today’s world, not serving the purpose of the law. See Jenkins v. Agri-Lines Corp., 100 Idaho 549, 553, 602 P.2d 47, 50 (Bistline, J., dissenting, with Donaldson, C.J., concurring therein). As Justice Shepard wrote for four members of the Court in Davenport v. State, Department of Employment, 103 Idaho 492, 494, 650 P.2d 634, 636 (1982):
The Employment Security Act was enacted to alleviate the hardships of involuntary unemployment and will be construed liberally to effectuate that purpose. Smith v. Department of Employment [100 Idaho 520, 602 P.2d 18 (1979)], supra: In re Potlatch Forests, Inc., 72 Idaho 291, 240 P.2d 242 (1952). As Justice Cardozo noted, in Chas. C. Steward Mach. Co. v. Davis, 301 U.S. 548, 593, 57 S.Ct. 883, 893, 81 L.Ed. 1279 (1937), “[a]n unemployment law framed in such a way that the unemployed who look to it will be deprived of reasonable protection is one in name and nothing more.” It is clearly the intent of the legislation that benefits be granted or denied based upon matters of substance rather than mere form, and the act will be construed to effectuate that intent.
The incongruence of this case is highlighted by two facts. First, Mr. Goolsby prevailed three times at the various Department of Employment appeals levels, losing only before the Commission, which based its decision on facts that the three previous examiners did not find. Second, Mr. Goolsby had been doing a good job for Life Savers when he was discharged. In fact, shortly before his discharge, his employer had seen fit to add a substantial increase to his salary, and in a rating evaluation just one week prior to his discharge, Mr. Goolsby was rated “good” to “very good” in every area of selling evaluated by his supervisor. Furthering this confusion, in this Court we have the two respondents, Life Savers and the Department of Employment, disagreeing with each other — the Department siding with Mr. Goolsby. What this all adds up to is three years of appeals, delays, and expenses, and a decision not based on the record. I cannot subscribe to such a result.

. In Pierstorff v. Gray's Auto Shop, 58 Idaho 438, 74 P.2d 171 (1937), this Court held:
The rule applicable to all witnesses, whether parties or interested in the event of an action, is, that either a board, court, or jury must accept as true the positive, uncontradicted testimony of a credible witness, unless his testimony is inherently improbable, or rendered so by facts and circumstances disclosed at the hearing or trial. (Manley v. Harvey Lumber Co., 175 Minn. 489, 221 N.W. 913, 914 [1928].) In Jeffrey v. Trouse, 100 Mont. 538, 50 Pac.(2d) 872, 874 [1935], it is held that neither the trial court nor a jury may arbitrarily or capriciously disregard the testimony of witness unimpeached by any of the modes known to the law, if such testimony does not exceed probability. And, in Arundel v. Turk, 16 Cal.App.(2d) 293, 60 Pac.(2d) 486, 487, 488 [1936], the rule is stated thus: “Testimony which is inherently improbable may be disregarded, but to warrant such action there must exist either a physical impossibility of the evidence being true, or its falsity must be apparent, without any resort to inferences or deductions."
The holding of Pierstorff has been consistently applied by this Court, as recently as in Dinneen v. Finch, 100 Idaho 620, 603 P.2d 575 (1979).

. It is interesting to note that in the neighboring state of Washington appeals such as this are made to the superior court. See Wash.Rev.Code § 50.32.120 (1984 Supp.), where judicial review is governed by the Administrative Procedure Act.