In a ruling Jan. 2, the state’s second highest court has extended worker’s compensation coverage to employees required to furnish their own vehicles for work who are injured on their way to or from their jobs.
The ruling comes in the case of a Johnston County health worker involved in a head-on collision en route from home to the home of her first patient of the day. Previously, under state case law, she would not have been eligible for worker’s compensation, because the accident happened while she going or coming to her job.
Norma Hollin worked for the Johnston County Council on Aging as a health-care aide. She provided assistance to patients in their homes on a fixed schedule. She worked from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and was paid an hourly wage plus 31 cents per mile for car expenses, and was required to drive her own car to each patient visit. She was not reimbursed for the mileage from home to her first visit of the day or from her last patient back to home.
On May 20, 2003, Hollin was badly injured in an automobile crash en route to visiting her first patient of the day. She filed a worker’s compensation claim, which was rejected by the North Carolina Industrial Commission.
The commission found that based upon the “going and coming rule” the injury happened outside the scope of Hollin’s employment. The rule states that “injuries sustained by an employee while going to or from work are not ordinarily compensable’ because the injuries do not arise out of or in the course of employment.”
The going-and-coming rule has a number of exceptions, including one for traveling salesmen, who have no fixed job hours or work site, and a contractual duty exception. The commission held that neither applied to Hollin. She saw the same patients at specific intervals and she had accepted a compensation package that specifically didn’t include reimbursement for mileage to the first or from the last visit of the day.
Hollin challenged the commission’s ruling before the state courts. The N.C. Court of Appeals found the commission’s determination that Hollin’s claim did not meet either the traveling-salesmen or contractual-duty exceptions to be correct. However, it still awarded benefits to Hollin.
“We nevertheless agree with plaintiff that her claim was compensable,” Judge Robert Hunter wrote for the appeals court.
In reaching that conclusion, the Court of Appeals referenced and approved of the analysis of Professor Arthur Larson: “If the employee as part of his or her job is required to bring along his or her own car, truck or motorcycle for use during the working day, the trip to and from work is by that fact alone embraced within the course of employment” and thus covered.
Courts in at least 14 other states have adopted this rule over the past half-century. One of these is Arkansas, which addressed the issue in a 1997 case, Olsten Kimberly Quality Care. The facts were much as in Hollin’s case, with an in-home nurse’s assistant injured driving on her way to her first patient of the day.
The Arkansas Supreme Court said, “It is… clear that delivering nursing services to patients at their homes is the raison d’etre of the [employer’s] business, and that traveling to patients’ homes is an essential component of that service.”
It went on to hold that is was “evident that [the claimant] was required by the very nature of her job description to submit herself to the hazards of day-to-day travel in her own vehicle, back and forth to the homes of her patients. As such, [the claimant] was acting within the course of her employment with [defendant-employer] at the time her injuries were sustained.”
The N.C. Court of Appeals was swayed by the decision’s logic.
“We find the reasoning of Olsten Kimberly Quality Care and the many jurisdictions that follow the rule expressed in Larson’s highly persuasive,” Hunter wrote, “and we hold that where an employee who is required to furnish their own vehicle as part of their employment is injured going to or coming from work, such injuries are covered by the Workers’ Compensation Act.”
Court of Appeals rulings are controlling interpretation of state law and binding upon both trial courts and administrative agencies unless overruled by the N.C. Supreme Court. Because the ruling by the three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals was unanimous, the high court is not required to take the case even should the Johnston County Council on Aging and its worker’s compensation insurer further appeal.
The case is Hollin v. Johnston County Council on Aging (06-310).
Michael Lowrey is associate editor of Carolina Journal.