New York: Interaction Between Hair Salon Owner and Difficult Customers Insufficient to Establish Heart Attack Claim

Stressing the important role that the state’s Workers’ Compensation Board plays in the weighing of all evidence, even that offered by medical experts, a New York appellate court affirmed the Board’s determination that a hair salon owner, who sustained a heart attack minutes after she had been involved in encounters with difficult customers, did not sustain injuries arising out of and in the course of the employment in spite of the presumption of compensability found in N.Y. Workers’ Comp. Law § 21(a). The Board gave more weight to the employer’s medical expert who concluded that the cause of claimant’s cardiac condition was advanced, triple vessel, obstructive coronary artery disease, and not the confrontations with the customers. The court also agreed that the level of stress faced by the salon owner was no greater than that experienced by other similarly situated workers. She failed to establish a compensable claim.

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 Matter of Issayou v Issayuou Inc., 2019 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 5814 (July 25, 2019)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 43.03.

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

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see