Court Opinion

ID: 9696381
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 18:46:23.932371+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:21.906597
License: Public Domain

OTIS, Justice
(dissenting).
I respectfully dissent. In my view Minn. Stat. § 176.101, subd. 2 (1980) implicitly recognizes the employee’s duty to make reasonably diligent effort to obtain other employment and should be construed as requiring an employee to prove that he has made such effort in order to be entitled to compensation for temporary partial disability. In this case the evidence establishes beyond question that employee could have obtained *462work in any environment not exposing him to the allergy-producing chemical within a few weeks after he left the employer’s pressroom. The record also reveals that employee made no effort even to obtain retraining for several months, during which his income from temporary total compensation voluntarily paid by the employer and from sick leave benefits also paid by the employer was equivalent to his earnings as a press operator. I would hold that the absence of a good-faith effort to obtain employment defeats his claim.
Moreover, I do not view the record as requiring the Workers’ Compensation Court of Appeals to accept Dr. Haber’s opinion as the basis for an inference of employee’s present earning capacity. Employee presented no evidence himself on this issue, and that court did not act unreasonably in declining to infer from Dr. Haber’s testimony the extent to which employee’s earning capacity has been diminished. I would affirm.