Georgia: Injury Sustained On Premises During Scheduled Lunch Break Not Compensable

Where a Georgia employee was injured in the break room in the process of taking her lunch outside during a scheduled lunch break, the state’s Board of Workers' Compensation did not err by applying the scheduled lunch break exception and by ruling that the ingress and egress rule did not apply to an employee leaving the employer's premises on a scheduled lunch break. The court indicated the employee's injury did not arise out of her employment, but rather out of an individual pursuit; her lunch breaks were scheduled, and she was free to do as she pleased during that time. The court also disapprove of previous holdings to the contrary in Travelers Ins. Co. v. Smith, 91 Ga. App. 305, 309, 85 S.E.2d 484 (1954), Chandler v. Gen. Acc. Fire & Life Assur. Corp., 101 Ga. App. 597, 114 S.E.2d 438 (1960), and Rockwell v. Lockheed Martin Corp., 248 Ga. App. 73, 545 S.E.2d 121 (2001).

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

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Frett v. State Farm Employee Workers' Comp., 2018 Ga. App. LEXIS 630 (Nov. 2, 2018)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 13.01.

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