In the only civil review grant from last week’s conference, the California Supreme Court agreed to review the Third District’s decision in Larkin v. Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board. Larkin involves an issue of what temporary disability payments might be available to full-time, salaried peace officers.
The petitioner filed a claim for temporary disability payments after he sustained various injuries in the course of his employment as a police officer for the City of Marysville. The workers’ compensation judge denied the claim, the Workers Compensation Appeals Board affirmed, and the Court of Appeal affirmed the Board.
The claim turned on the meaning of Labor Code Section 4458.2, which provides:
If an active peace officer of any department as described in Section 3362 suffers injury or death while in the performance of his or her duties as a peace officer . . . then, irrespective of his or her remuneration from this or other employment or from both, his or her average weekly earnings for the purposes of determining temporary disability indemnity and permanent disability indemnity shall be taken at the maximum fixed for each, respectively, in Section 4453 . . .
Section 3362 simply deemed police officers as “employees” of the relevant government: “Each male or female member registered as an active policeman or policewoman of any regularly organized police department . . . shall . . . be deemed an employee of such county, city, town or district for the purpose of this division and shall be entitled to receive compensation from such county, city, town or district in accordance with the provisions thereof.”
The petitioner argued that he was an active peace officer, so the statute authorized temporary disability benefits at the set rate for him. But that “would be an absurd result,” the Court of Appeal found.
The Court pointed out that Section 3362 appears in an Article of the Labor Code called “Employees.” The Code offers the broadest possible definition of “employee” – “every person in the service of an employer” – and carves out limited exceptions for volunteers and independent contractors. So it was undisputed that the petitioner was an “employee” of the City. There was no need for Section 3362 to separately say so.
The Sections in the immediate neighborhood of 3362 are concerned with deeming certain persons who would not ordinarily be considered employees to be such for purposes of entitlement to workers compensation benefits. Section 3361 addresses volunteer firefighters, Section 3364 volunteer members of a sheriff’s reserve, and Sections 3365, 3366 and 3367 those who voluntarily assist law enforcement and firefighters upon request. In each section, the affected individuals are deemed employees and awarded temporary disability at the maximum rate. The idea, the Court wrote, was to encourage public service by volunteers. Without these provisions, one injured in the voluntary service of a government entity might lose his or her income for a time and have no means of support, since workers’ comp from his or her regular employer wouldn’t be available.
If Section 3362 was intended to apply only to salaried officers, volunteer peace officers would have no recourse if injured while they were working. This would “punish them for their service,” the Court wrote, and “leave such volunteers in a markedly different position than volunteers of other public safety agencies. This cannot be what the Legislature intended.”
We expect Larkin to be decided in eight to ten months.
Image courtesy of Flickr by Nic Walker (no changes).