OKLAHOMA CITY (Legal Newsline) - Oklahoma’s highest court reinstated a workers’ compensation claim by a school cafeteria employee who tripped in the parking lot while returning from a smoke break and claimed her injuries occurred “inside” the facility while she was performing work-related duties.
The decision by the Oklahoma Supreme Court extended the definition of “inside the employer’s facility” under state law to include any property owned by an employer, including parking lots. A pair of judges dissented, saying the majority’s interpretation renders the phrase “idle and meaningless.”
Darlene Johnson was walking back from a smoke break off campus, as mandated under state law, when she tripped over a piece of concrete, slamming her head into the exterior wall of the building and fracturing her arm as she fell. The 72-year-old woman was medically barred from working for two years as she underwent surgery to repair the damage and laid off in 2019.
Johnson filed a claim under the Oklahoma Workers’ Compensation Act, but the Midwest City Del Public School system denied her request, saying she was not in the “course and scope of employment” when she fell. She took the claim before an administrative law judge, who rejected the school district’s arguments. The school district appealed to the Workers’ Compensation Commission, which reversed the ALJ’s decision, finding that the term “facility” referred to the building, not the parking lot.
The commission further found that Johnson performed all her job duties inside the cafeteria, she didn’t do any work in the parking lot, and she wasn’t required to leave the building for work breaks.
Johnson appealed to the Oklahoma Supreme Court, which restored the ALJ’s findings in a May 25 decision. Writing for the majority, Justice James Winchester ruled that the Workers’ Comp Commission exceeded its authority when it defined “facility” to exclude the parking lot. While that specific word isn’t defined by statute, Justice Winchester wrote, the court “has long since recognized that in the context of a workers' compensation claim, the employer's parking lot constitutes an employer's premises.”
The majority relied upon a 2016 decision allowing a woman to claim workers’ comp benefits over a slip-and-fall on the sidewalk outside Oklahoma State University, as well as decisions going back as far as 1944 approving claims of employees walking back and forth to work.
“Johnson had to leave the school premises because tobacco use was prohibited inside the school premises,” the majority ruled. “Johnson was acting within the course and scope of her employment by honoring this policy of her employer. Johnson's injuries arose inside the school premises.”
Judge Dustin P. Rowe dissented, joined by Justice James Winchester. He said the majority defined “inside the employer's facility” “very broadly, taking it to mean that any injury that occurs during an authorized break on the employer's premises falls within the course and scope of employment.”
Oklahoma legislators used the term “inside” to restrict where employees could file workers’ comp claims, the dissenters wrote. To include parking lots in the definition “would render the phrase idle and meaningless,” they concluded.