Court Opinion

ID: 9590349
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 23:54:05.346749+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:13:44.679612
License: Public Domain

Judge PHILLIPS
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
Though I agree that under various decisions of our Supreme Court the claims against the decedent’s employer and the individual defendant were properly dismissed, the opinion with respect to these claims, in my view, is incorrectly and unduly broad in several respects. First, it erroneously broadens the alter ego doctrine, a device not for escaping individual liability but establishing it; and the action against the individual defendant was properly dismissed not just because he owns and operates the corporation, but because the duty he allegedly violated was not *49one that one employee owed to another but was the nondelegable duty the corporate employer owed the decedent to provide him a safe working place. 2A A. Larson, Workmen’s Compensation Law Sec. 72.13, pp. 14-81 to 14-84 (1988). Second, nor would holding Rowland individually liable, if he had violated an employee’s duty, negate the exclusivity provision of the act, as the majority supposes; for the exclusivity provision, as G.S. 97-10.1 explicitly provides, applies only to an employee’s claim against his employer and holding that it automatically applies to any third party, whoever it may be, is without legislative authority. Third, holding that working a man in a narrow dirt ditch 18 feet deep is not inherently dangerous is contrary to reality, in my opinion; and the legal test applied to this question, despite its origin, is meaningless legal jargon.
But in my view the dismissal of plaintiffs action against the general contractor, Davidson & Jones, was erroneous. The majority holding that notwithstanding the contractor’s direct knowledge, through its on-the-site supervisor, that the subcontractor was recklessly exposing its employees to death or serious injury by working them in an 18 foot trench that was unshored, inadequately sloped and not equipped with a trench box, it had no duty to take steps to eliminate that hazard is a view of the law I do not share. That a general contractor ordinarily has no general duty to protect the employees of its independent contractor against its neglect of which it knows nothing is sound law, but it does not apply to these circumstances. As the occupier of the construction site, defendant Davidson & Jones had a duty to warn even nontrespassing strangers as to dangers in the premises that it knew of and the contractor knew about the hazardous ditch and according to the supervisor would not have permitted its employees to work in it. But it was more than a mere occupier of land, as all the construction work, including that farmed out to independent contractors, was being done for it. Having direct knowledge of an imminent hazard to the life of a worker on its project, the efficiency of the construction, its own interest and that of the subcontractor, and the law’s concern for human life required that it take steps at once to eliminate that hazard. No reasonable general contractor knowing of such a hazard to a subcontractor’s employee — whether it was a potentially crumbling ditch, an insecure hoist, inefficient bolting and riveting of steel framing, or an unin*50sulated line charged with electricity — would idly permit the hazard to remain unabated to the danger of workers on its project.