New Jersey: Court Strikes Down Employment Contract Provision Limiting Employee’s Right to Sue Third Party

A provision in an employment contract that limited an employee’s right to sue a third party for negligence and instead required the injured employee to accept only the benefits that he could recover under the New Jersey Workers’ Compensation Act was against public policy and unenforceable, held an appellate court. The employee worked as a security guard for a firm that contracted with the defendant firm to provide security services at its facility. An important fact: the employee was not assigned to work for defendant, but was on defendant’s premises for other business related to his employer. He fell down some stairs and sustained injuries. His employment contract prohibited him from suing any of the employer’s clients or customers. Quoting Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the court said the plaintiff was not the special employee of defendant and the trial court, therefore, appropriately allowed his case to go to the jury, which awarded some $900,000 in damages. The trial court did err, however, in failing to charge the jury regarding plaintiff’s potential contributory negligence.

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 Vitale v. Schering-Plough Corp., 2016 N.J. Super. LEXIS 114 (Aug. 22, 2016)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 67.01.

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