Court Opinion

ID: 9648527
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 14:25:24.689495+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:12:02.501356
License: Public Domain

Henderson, J.,
filed the following dissenting opinion. In all of the compensation cases heretofore decided by this Court, in which a claimant has successfully avoided the bar of limitations by invoking the estoppel clause of the Compensation Act, there has been an affirmative representation on the part of the employer, reasonably calculated to mislead the claimant into thinking that a claim for compensation would be filed for him. I cannot find any evidence of such a representation in the instant case.
It is true that there is no explanation as to just why the plant doctor filled out a certificate of disability describing a non-accidental injury, when the original report referred to an accident. Presumably the doctor’s statement was based on what the claimant told him. There were, of course, two mutually exclusive funds established by the employer against which claims might be made, depending upon the nature of the injury, and it may be that the illiterate claimant did not know the difference. But in any event at the time of the conference on November 9, 1950, of which a stenographic transcript was taken, the claimant had received a letter from the Railroad Retirement Board stating, in effect, that if he were receiving workmen’s compensation he was ineligible for Railroad Retirement benefits, and a letter from the State *161Industrial Accident Commission stating that no compensation claim had been filed on his behalf, and enclosing a form to be used if he intended to claim compensation. At the conference, the claimant denied that he had told the Retirement Board he was getting workmen’s compensation on account of his present injury. In effect, he agreed that his back injury had not been due to an accident, for he did not reassert his alleged statement in the initial report, that he stepped in a hole.
The majority opinion seems to hold that the element of deception in the instant case was supplied by the offer to help the claimant answer the letter from the Railroad Retirement Board. Certainly the claimant was aware of the fact that no compensation claim had been filed up to that time. But it is equally clear that no one promised the claimant to file a compensation claim at the conference. The offer to help answer the letter from the Retirement Board, in order to get him a little bit more money, had reference to the fact that unless the Retirement Board was assured that he had not claimed, and would not claim, workmen’s compensation, he would not be eligible to receive anything from that Board to supplement the non-accidental benefits he was receiving from his employer. It is true that the employer’s agents had a motive to persuade him to claim sickness benefits instead of workmen’s compensation, since the employer was a self-insurer as to the latter, and carried group insurance on the former. But to hold that an offer to help him get Retirement benefits can be reasonably relied on or translated into an offer to file for compensation on an inconsistent theory, seems to me to be a distortion of the facts and an unwarranted extension of the doctrine of estoppel. Even though illiterate, a claimant who has permitted the period of limitations to expire must point to some affirmative undertaking to do for him what the law requires him to do, upon which he might reasonably rely.
I think the judgment should be reversed.