Federal: Oregon’s Retaliatory Discharge Statute Offers No Protection Where Comp Claim Filed in Another State

A federal district court in Oregon, construing Or. Rev. Stat. § 659A.040—the state’s retaliatory discharge provision—held that the statute protects only those workers who apply for, invoke, or utilize the procedures of the Oregon workers’ compensation system, and not the system established by any other state. Accordingly, where Plaintiff, who worked out of his Oregon home for a New York employer, was terminated approximately one month after filing a workers’ compensation claim in New York (following a work-related New York auto accident), Plaintiff could not maintain a retaliatory discharge action under § 659A.040 against his former employer. Citing Jenkins v. Vestas-American Wind Tech., Inc., 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 47677 (D. Or. Apr. 4, 2014) and Anderson v. Hibu, Inc., 26 F. Supp. 3d 1019 (D. Or. 2014), the court concluded that at the time of Plaintiff’s discharge, he had applied for and/or invoked only the benefits of the New York workers’ compensation system. He, therefore, had failed to establish that the employer violated § 659A.040.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is the co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Kwiecinski v. Medi-Tech International Corp., 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 72453 (D. Or., June 3, 2016)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 104.07.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law.

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