Court Opinion

ID: 8037304
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-09-09 03:22:24.299866+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T16:37:11.077751
License: Public Domain

Rose, J.,
dissenting.
The opinion- of the majority reflects the care and skill with which the evidence has been reviewed and the law ■stated, but there seems to me to be a different view of the case, equally plausible and perhaps more in keeping with the purpose and spirit of the workmen’s compensation law. It was said in a recent opinion, following earlier decisions:
“It was a purpose of that legislation to shift from employee to modern industry burdens of economic waste or loss arising out of and in the course of his employment as & result of his accidental injury or death and to prevent his *844dependents from becoming a public charge.” Moise v. Fruit Dispatch Co., ante, p. 684, 283 N. W. 495.
A rule of interpretation reads thus:
“It has long been the policy of this state to give a liberal construction of the workmen’s compensation law, so that its beneficent purposes might not be thwarted by technical refinement of interpretation.” Maryland Casualty Co. v. Geary, 123 Neb. 851, 244 N. W. 797.
Of course the death of an employee is not compensable, if it does not arise out of the employment. The question is, did it so arise within the meaning of the workmen’s compensation law?
In the present instance defendant was engaged in a great industry — electric refrigeration. The employee was a skilled electrical engineer. He was a man of good character and good habits. He did not designate the place where the duties of his employment called him. He had no choice of location or environment. His employer selected for. him the identical room where electrical adjustments were to be made and tested according to standards of the employee’s profession. The employee was directed to work in a beer tavern and barroom where beer was sold over a bar by the drink to persons standing about it or seated at tables in front of it. During the entire time required for the performance of the duties of employee, he was mentally and physically alert. While he was awaiting the result of a scientific test in the beer-cooling system in the barroom, a dangerous criminal with aliases and prison records, who had been drinking at intervals in the barroom nearly all afternoon, struck the employee without provocation and killed him. This was the place selected by the employer for the performance of the employee’s duties.
It is common knowledge that a barroom is a place of danger frequented by ruthless criminals. When such common knowledge was notorious, the legislature created a department of government to license beer taverns and keep barrooms under surveillance. An employer may anticipate such a danger when he sends an employee into an open barroom to work.
*845In my opinion an electrical engineer employed for a complete service requiring tests and awaiting results in putting a beer-cooling system in order performs the duties of his employment while thus waiting as well as when using tools in making the adjustments. He was then in the place of employment engaged in his employer’s business. He had at the time and place no other task for his employer or himself. He was in the midst of conviviality. Thus surrounded, he did nothing to impair his capacity for service as an employee or to provoke an assault. No duty was neglected. If he was negligent in drinking beer on a summer day with a dangerous criminal whose character was then unknown, such mere negligence did not prevent the allowance of statutory compensation for his death. Where an electrical engineer is assigned to a particular job until finished and is required to make adjustments and await results of tests, the relation of employer and employee does not attach when he begins work on an adjustment and detach while waiting for the- result of a test, though, in the interim, he may drink beer which he is cooling by scientific processes.
Refinements and subtle reasoning to show that an employee departs from and resumes his work in a case of this kind seem to me to be more consistent with the rigors of the old common law than with a modern statute simplifying judicial procedure for the benefit of workmen under the compensation law. In my judgment the employment, under such circumstances, is continuous until the work in hand is completed, unless terminated by the employer or by the wilful negligence of the employee or by an independent, self-created hazard. The work in the case at bar had not been completed when employee was killed. He was then awaiting the results of adjustments just made and dismantled appliances had not been replaced. Some of his tools were still in the barroom where he had been working. As I view the whole case, the homicide would not have been committed, except for the place of danger in which the employee was directed by his employer to work. It seems *846to me the death of the employee arose out of his employment, within the meaning of the workmen’s compensation law. The industry should bear part of the loss. The entire burden shou’d not fall on the dependent widow or on the public.