Court Opinion

ID: 9539448
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 16:04:26.267602+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T14:58:49.664137
License: Public Domain

Beasley, Judge,
dissenting.
I concur in the result reached in the dissent but for the following reasons:
The question is whether the injury arose out of and in the course of the employment of the appellant. OCGA § 34-9-1 (4).
Claimant was employed as a secretary/typist with the State Labor Department, Employment Security Agency. Her supervisor regularly asked her to go out for his lunch so he could keep working. Her job description did not expressly make this a duty, but the job description did include a provision that, in addition to her listed duties, she was to “perform other duties as assigned by the office manager.”
Assuming that her supervisor was the office manager, the duties which he had authority to ask her to do would have to come within the range of duties reasonably contemplated by the nature of her job as a secretary/typist. There is no evidence that fetching a supervisor’s lunch is normally a part of a secretary/typist’s duties. Going for her supervisor’s lunch involved no secretarial functions and no typist functions, nor was such an activity incidental to either of these categories of work.
The activity did not come within the job description duties expressly. And it certainly did not come within that portion of the job description which required her to perform other duties assigned, be*92cause there is no evidence that her supervisor had authority to assign her to go get his lunch. As a matter of fact, he apparently thought he did not have such authority, as he thought she was getting it on her own lunch hour and he said he did not assign it to her as a job duty. There is no showing that the supervisor was required, as part of his employment responsibilities, to work through the lunch period which the State normally provides to all of its employees. He simply volunteered to forego his lunch period to continue working for their common employer. Without any showing that his employment required it, such activity was a commendable but gratuitous act on the supervisor’s part.
This volunteer work of his could not support the assignment to the secretary/typist of the task of getting his lunch. He could not make such an assignment to his secretary/typist unless such assignment was specifically within her job description or reasonably deducible from it or from the catch-all clause which still is bounded by duties related to a secretary/typist job. Had she refused, he could not have compelled her to do it or cite her for insubordination. He could only impose on her good nature to get his lunch as a personal favor.
Thus her acquiescence, prompted as it may have been to keep a good record or please her supervisor or gain favor and a good report from him, did not convert her action into one arising out of her employment, regardless of how pressured she felt to do it. Her employer’s business was the administration of the laws regarding labor, as a public agency. Going out for her supervisor’s lunch, when there was no showing that the business of the Labor Department Employment Security Agency required it or necessitated it, was simply outside the scope of her duties in this particular job. Whether she did it on her own time or on company time is not controlling.
The application of the law to the undisputed facts leads to the conclusion that the claimant was not performing the duties of a secretary/typist, as defined in the job description and as reasonably within the scope of such a position, at the time of injury. Nor was there any emergency of the employer agency requiring the supervisor to relinquish his lunch period and which might therefore allow him to require her to get his lunch. The test is an objective one, as it must be, and whether the supervisor thought the secretary/typist was doing it on her own time is as inconclusive to coverage as whether the latter thought she was doing it during company time. These are subjective factors and do not establish outright whether or not it was within the scope of her employment for the Labor Department.
In determining what constitutes “the employment,” it is the employer who decides its range and scope, not the employees and certainly not the law. It is a question of fact, here focusing on the state agency which employed both the claimant and her supervisor. The *93evidence here does not support the finding that this activity was a part of the claimant’s employment as defined by her employer.
Whether or not the activity the employee was engaged in at the time of injury benefited the employer is a dangerous test. Anything the employee does so as to relieve a co-worker, no matter how personal the business of the aided employee which the helping employee engages in, so long as the relieved employee keeps working on the employer’s business, could qualify. Rather it is the nature of the injured employee’s work and position, and not the benefit to the employer arising out of the relieved co-employee’s work, that should apply.
The superior court reversal of the Board award should be affirmed. I am authorized to state that Presiding Judge Deen and Judge Pope join in this dissent.