Ohio: Employee’s Failure to Follow Safety Rules—Not His Comp Claim—Caused Termination from Employment

Where an employee suffered an amputation of a finger when his Kevlar glove became entangled in one of the rotating machines at his employer’s facility, in spite of the fact that the employer had a safety rule, which the employee acknowledged he had read, that prohibited the use of such Kevlar gloves near the machinery, and where the employee was terminated shortly after returning to his employment because he again was observed wearing the prohibited gloves, there was sufficient evidence to support a trial court’s determination that the firing had been for violation of a safety policy and not because he had filed a workers’ compensation claim.

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

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See Creveling v. Lakepark Indus., 2021-Ohio-764, 2021 Ohio App. LEXIS 770 (Mar. 12, 2021)

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

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

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see

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