Court Opinion

ID: 9761080
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 01:31:15.310733+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T10:21:03.831396
License: Public Domain

PALLADINO, Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent. For the following reasons, I would reverse the Board and reinstate the referee’s order which granted Claimant’s petition for reinstatement of total disability benefits.
In 1984, Employer filed a petition for suspension or modification of Claimant’s total disability benefits. To satisfy its burden of proving entitlement to a modification of Claimant’s benefits, Employer had to produce evidence of referrals to then-available jobs within Claimant’s physical limitations. Kachinski v. Workmen’s Compensation Appeal Board (Vepco Construction Co.), 516 Pa. 240, 532 A.2d 374 (1987). Employer presented evidence showing that it had offered Claimant a *366job which it had specially created within Claimant’s physical limitations and which Claimant had refused. Apart from the tailor-made job offered by Employer, Employer chose to produce no evidence of available jobs within Claimant’s physical limitations. The referee found that Claimant continued to be disabled from performing his pre-injury job as an auto mechanic. However, the referee also found that, despite Claimant’s refusal to accept the job specially created for him by Employer, Claimant had become partially disabled on the basis of Employer’s offer of the specially-created job within Claimant’s physical limitations.
Subsequently, Claimant filed a petition for reinstatement of his total disability benefits on the ground that he had recently applied for the tailor-made job earlier offered by Employer and had been told that the job no longer existed. We are asked to consider on appeal what Claimant’s burden of proof for reinstatement of total disability benefits should be under the factual circumstances of this case.
Although this court has stated that an employer is not forever an insurer of a tailor-made job for a partially disabled claimant, this court has also recognized the serious potential for abuse that would arise if an employer could forever satisfy its burden of proving job availability simply by once offering a specially-created job to a claimant. Smith v. Workmen’s Compensation Appeal Board (Futura Industries), 80 Pa.Commonwealth Ct. 508, 471 A.2d 1304 (1984). When a finding of partial disability rests exclusively on an employer’s offer of a specially-created job, the finding becomes devoid of any evidentiary support upon the employer’s withdrawal of the tailor-made job because there remains no other proof in the record of any available jobs within the claimant’s physical limitations. Busche v. Workmen’s Compensation Appeal Board (Townsend and Bottum, Inc.), 77 Pa.Commonwealth Ct. 469, 466 A.2d 278 (1983). Consequently, where an employer chooses to prove the availability of jobs within a claimant’s physical limitations by presenting evidence solely of a job specially created by the employer, the employer accepts the risk that *367the claimant will again be found totally disabled if the employer withdraws the tailor-made job. Smith; Busche.
Therefore, I would hold that a claimant has carried his burden of proving entitlement to a reinstatement of total disability benefits if the claimant has established that the past evidence of available jobs within the claimant’s physical limitations was restricted to an employer’s offer of a tailor-made job and the employer has since withdrawn the job offer. Concomitantly, I would also hold that a claimant’s initial refusal of a tailor-made job should not constitute a permanent bar to the reinstatement of the claimant’s total disability benefits when the claimant later becomes willing to accept the tailor-made job but the employer indicates that the tailor-made job is no longer available to the claimant. To defeat such a claimant’s reinstatement petition, an employer would have to prove the present availability of jobs within the claimant’s physical limitations. See Busche.
Because Employer has not produced any evidence of presently available jobs within Claimant’s physical limitations, I would reverse the Board’s order and reinstate the referee’s order which granted Claimant’s petition for reinstatement.