Court Opinion

ID: 9568233
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 20:01:43.605371+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T10:24:29.356778
License: Public Domain

Levin, J.
(concurring in Golee; dissenting in Travis). The majority holds that the intentional tort exception to the exclusive remedy provision of the Worker’s Disability Compensation Act applies when an employer subjects an employee to a continuous risk of danger, and applies that construction to preclude this action in tort and to limit Travis to worker’s compensation benefits. Because the majority’s ruling is contrary to the result intended by the Legislature, I would affirm the decision of the Court of Appeals.
i
Section 131(1) of the worker’s compensation act provides:
The right to the recovery of benefits as provided in this act shall be the employee’s exclusive remedy against the employer for a personal injury or occupational disease. The only exception to this exclusive remedy is an intentional *193tort. An intentional tort shall exist only when an employee is injured as a result of a deliberate act of the employer and the employer specifically intended an injury. An employer shall be deemed to have intended to injure if the employer had actual knowledge that an injury was certain to occur and willfully disregarded that knowledge. The issue of whether an act was an intentional tort shall be a question of law for the court. This subsection shall not enlarge or reduce rights under law. [MCL 418.131(1); MSA 17.237(131)(1).]
My principal disagreement with the majority concerns its construction and application of the term “certain to occur.”
Although we agree that subsection 131(1) does not require a one hundred percent probability that an action will cause a result to deem an injury intentional, the majority employs an incomplete risk analysis, draws selective guidance from precedents, and views the facts improperly in denying these plaintiffs the now legislatively mandated remedy.
A
The language of the intentional tort exception currently under scrutiny was enacted in 1987 PA 28. That language was clearly a contraction of the broader range of conduct for which an employee could recover damages from an employer under this Court’s decision in Beauchamp v Dow Chemical Co, 427 Mich 1; 398 NW2d 882 (1986). As the lead opinion observes, the language currently at issue was a compromise between the two houses of the Legislature. The Senate had pressed for a version that would have required the employer to have specifically intended the injury to occur. The House version would have implied intent where the employer knew *194the injury was “likely to occur.” The final result, by all accounts, was somewhere in the middle. Calladine v Dana Corp, 679 F Supp 700, 703 (ED Mich, 1988); Senate Fiscal Agency Analysis, SB 67 (Third Analysis), May 26, 1987.
The lead opinion relies on the legislative record respecting the passage of 1987 PA 28 for assistance in determining the exception’s contours. Although Senator Dillingham stated that the language was intended to prevent recovery when the employer was “less than 100 percent” certain, Senator Cherry stated:
The change in the standard although narrowing the substantial certainty test does not preclude the specific cases which the Supreme Court indicated were actionable under the Beauchamp decision. [1987 Journal of the Senate 1235.]
Those three cases were People v O’Neil, unpublished opinion of the Cook County, Illinois, Circuit Court, issued June 14, 1985 (Docket Nos. 83-11091, 84-5064), better known as the Film Recovery case, Serna v Statewide Contractors, Inc, 6 Ariz App 12; 429 P2d. 504 (1967), and Barnes v Double Seal Glass Co, 129;Mich App 66; 341 NW2d 812 (1983). The lead opinion establishes the Film Recovery case as the line beyond which an employer may not tread. I agree. My disagreement with the lead opinion springs from its failure to include or consider the other two cases cited alongside the Film Recovery case by Senator Cherry and how they affect our interpretation of the intentional tort exception.
As the lead opinion implicitly recognizes, absolute unavoidability of the consequences cannot be the standard for determining when an event is “certain to occur.” Even the deliberate firing of a gun directly at *195an employee is not certain to cause injury if the employer’s aim is untrue. Yet, if the bullet should find its mark, no court would hesitate to find the injury “certain to occur” despite its evitability.
This principle is made clear by the Film Recovery case, which all seem to agree presents a circumstance meriting tort recovery. The lead opinion relies on Film Recovery to set its standard for certainty, yet it is clear from the facts of that case that an injury was not certain to occur. The plaintiff was not the only worker performing the same task, and he was not injured on his first day on the job. If working with the chemical carried a one hundred percent probability of injury, the bodies would have piled up, and done so much sooner.
Properly understood, the term “certain” in the statute must mean some unacceptably high, but not complete, risk. It is higher than our previous formulation, “substantial certainty.” Similarly, it represents greater danger than the risk necessary to support negligence or even gross negligence. Nonetheless, it cannot mean a one hundred percent likelihood that an injury will occur, because such certainty does not, as a practical matter, exist in this world.
B
The lead opinion’s error begins when it vouchsafes the “laws of probability” as having no bearing on the resolution of this issue. One obvious and applicable canon of those clear but disfavored laws is that a single exposure to a great risk can be just as “certain” to cause an injury as repeated exposures to lesser risks. Thus, an employee who must play one game of Russian roulette with four bullets' in a six-shot revolver is *196no better or worse off than an employee who must play six games with the same weapon loaded with only one bullet, spinning the chamber after every game. Notably, neither employee is exposed to a one hundred percent chance of injury.
The precedents at issue in this case reflect the same combination of risks. The plaintiffs in Serna and Barnes faced a single, highly risky task: digging in an unbuttressed ditch and pushing an overloaded cart of glass. The plaintiff in Film Recovery faced a slighter risk, but faced it continuously and over a long period of time. As this Court implied in Beauchamp, all these cases present injuries resulting from equally unacceptable risks.
The lead opinion, however, while repeatedly referencing Film Recovery, does not discuss Serna or Barnes although they spring from precisely the same judicial and legislative sources. Instead, the lead opinion adds a reference to Gulden v Crown Zellerbach Corp, 890 F2d 195 (CA 9, 1989), a case it says would withstand the “certain to occur” requirement. Ante at 175-176. In Gulden, the plaintiffs’ employer ordered them to work in contact with toxic levels of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), without any protective clothing, for a period of five days, while concealing the danger from them. 890 F2d 197.
The result of this selective examination of precedent is to narrow the conception of risk relevant to the interpretation of this statute. In all the cases favored by the lead opinion, the risks encountered by an employee are lower level, but continuous dangers. The cases that vanish from its analysis, Serna and *197Barnes, both involve isolated but extremely dangerous activities.
This incomplete description of the relevant cases injects an illogical and unfounded “continuousness” criteria into the lead opinion’s formulation:
When an employer subjects an employee to a continuously operative dangerous condition that it knows will cause an ii\jury, yet refrains from informing the employee about the dangerous condition so that he is unable to take steps to keep from being injured, a factfinder may conclude that the employer had knowledge that an injury is certain to occur. [Ante at 178.][1]
After so limiting the scope of the inquiry, the lead opinion readily distinguishes Travis. Travis, it argues, should not recover because the risk that her hand would be mangled by a defective press was only occasional, not “continuously operating.” Although the lead opinion may have allowed an action in Serna, where the plaintiffs were twice put in jeopardy of being buried alive, it would appear to deny recov*198ery to the plaintiff in Barnes, because he only faced the risk of having his skull sliced off by plate glass once.
Subsection 131(1) is a limitation on the risks that employers can subject their employees to, and therefore whether an injury is “certain to occur” for purposes of the statute is obviously a question of probabilities. By randomly limiting the dangers covered by the intentional tort exception to continuous risks, the lead opinion improperly limits the appropriate and logical extent of that provision. The rule announced today will directly affect those workers who face grave, if intermittent, dangers; workers who are distinguished only by the type, rather than the magnitude, of the risk they endure. The first of those workers is Travis.
n
"When all the guidance available from the Legislature and judiciary is considered, it is clear that the dangers the defendant exposed Travis to are well within the range of risk contemplated by the statute.
A
The lead opinion has set forth a thorough and convincing description of the danger Golec was subjected to. I continue briefly only to underscore the similarity of Golec’s case to the Film Recovery case. In Film Recovery, the danger resulted from immersing silver in a cyanide solution. In Golec, the danger was caused by placing an aerosol can or wet scrap into a vat of molten metal. In both cases, a reaction could be predicted with scientific certainty. In both cases, that reaction posed a serious threat to the health of work*199ers nearby. In both cases, the employer knew of the risk and deliberately failed to protect the worker from it. In both cases, it appears the employer sheltered the employee from knowledge of the danger. In neither was harm one hundred percent certain, but if a reasonable person had to choose between a few moments exposure to cyanide gas or to molten metal, I doubt any would choose either.
If Golee were to prove at trial that his employer knew that aerosol cans or wet scrap were included in the material Golee was instructed to place in the molten metal, and if Golee were to further prove that the employer understood the results of this combination, Golee then would be entitled to submission of the issue whether an intentional tort was committed to a jury. This case was disposed of on summary disposition; I join in remanding this case for trial.
Golec’s recovery should not be limited because such an explosion had not occurred before on the theory that no rational owner would wilfully bring such damage upon its (insured) plant. An employer can not be excused for exposing his employee to an unacceptably high risk of injury simply because he himself underestimated the ultimate damage that occurred. The relevant inquiry is whether the level of risk that the defendant did know about was excessive (a question for the jury), not whether he anticipated the full potential for disaster.
B
The lead opinion carefully details the circumstances leading to the injury suffered by Travis, concluding it was not “certain” to occur. The lead opinion focuses on its observation that “plaintiff was not *200required to confront a continually operating dangerous condition. The press double cycled only intermittently.” Ante at 182.
Travis, however, had operated the machine for some time before the accident, each repetition exposing her to the risk that finally manifested itself. More importantly, the lead opinion confuses a continual danger that only occasionally manifests itself in an injury with an intermittent danger. By the lead opinion’s logic, a gun used in a game of Russian roulette fires “only intermittently,” somehow reducing the peril of the game.
The most hollow evidence marshaled by the lead opinion was the supervisor’s willingness “to operate the press himself.”2 The lead opinion relies on this evidence, even though it acknowledges that Travis did not know the machine was malfunctioning while the supervisor had actual knowledge of that risk.
Having in mind the particular ailment afflicting this machine, it should be clear that knowledge of its potential malfunction would make operating it safely considerably more likely. Similarly, the lead opinion’s reliance on evidence that “no one had ever been injured when the press double cycled previously” is misplaced if none of the previous operators were working with the same blindfold placed on Travis. Indeed, had the employer informed Travis of the problem with the machine, it is possible recovery would be less appropriate, and likely the injury would not have occurred.
Although the lead opinion acknowledges that “concealing a known danger from an employee who has *201no independent knowledge of the danger may be evidence of an intent to injure,” it apparently allows two pieces of evidence that should be discredited by that omission to overpower it. Unlike the lead opinion, I ascribe much greater significance to the wilful concealment of the danger from Travis. In both of the cases relied on by the lead opinion, Film Recovery and Gulden, the courts relied on the failure of the employers to apprise the employees of the danger. In all these cases, it can be assumed that the employer failed to inform the employees of the risk because the employer feared the employees, being rational, would refuse to further expose themselves to the risk. The gravity of such a likely conclusion cannot be understated, for it implies that the defendants themselves felt the risk was unreasonable.3
Most remarkably, the lead opinion suggests that even if this risk was unacceptable, Travis should nonetheless be limited to a worker’s compensation recovery because Travis’ supervisor did not “willfully disregard” the danger she was exposed to. The lead opinion reasons that because the supervisor adjusted the machine, and because the supervisor could operate the machine so adjusted without severing his hands, he did not wilfully expose Travis to the risk. But this only shows that the supervisor did not knowingly expose himself to the risk. As noted, the crucial *202fact that the supervisor neglected to inform Travis of the danger inherent in operating the press reinstates all the culpability the lead opinion attempts to remove by reciting the supervisor’s uncommunicated knowledge and unreplicable accomplishments.
Because both the employers in these cases exposed workers to risks within the coverage of subsection 131(1), I would reinstate both claims.
Cavanagh, J., concurred with Levin, J.

 The lead opinion maintains:
[C]ontrary to Justice Levin’s observations, we do not conclude that an injury resulting from a single highly risky task could not, under appropriate circumstances, form the basis of a claim for relief. The indisputable focus of the legislation, however, is not the riskiness of the task, but whether the employer intended the injury. [Ante at 181, n 15.]
To the extent this statement implies that the lead opinion agrees with the analysis of risk endorsed by this opinion, I meet it with enthusiasm.
The focus of the legislation is clearly “whether the employer intended the injury,” but the legislation also allows evidence that an employer knowingly subjected an employee to a great risk to act as a proxy for actual intent, and it has in no way indicated it intends to limit that proxy in the way the lead opinion today may be seen as implying. Quite the contrary, the legislative intent plainly embraces any high risk, be it the product of an isolated or continuous exposure to danger.

 Ante at 182.

 The Court of Appeals in Cavalier Mfg Co v Employers Ins of Wausau, 211 Mich App 330, 338; 535 NW2d 583 (1995), noted that in cases where recovery was allowed:
Either the employee was unable to avoid the injury despite the exercise of due care or the employee was deprived of the opportunity to use due care by the employer’s concealment of information concerning the existence or nature of the risk.