Oregon: Employee’s Enjoyment Did Not Transform Walk to Post Office to Recreational Act

Oregon, like a number of other states, has a statutory provision that bars recovery of workers’ compensation benefits if the injury is sustained while the employee is engaged in recreational activity [see Or. Rev. Stat. § 656.005(7)(b)(B)]. An employer could not successfully maintain that an employee’s injuries were sustained during “recreational” activity where an office employee, who enjoyed walking, volunteered to take an important envelope to the post office for mailing. A co-owner of the business was already heading to the bank and indicated he or she would mail the envelope while the co-owner was out and about. Initially, the office employee consented, but then indicated she would like to take the envelope herself. The office employee did so and was struck by a car as she returned to the office. The appellate court held that the fact that the office employee derived some degree of personal enjoyment from the trip to the post office did not mean the task of mailing the envelope had lost its work-related nature.

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. Bracketed citations link to lexis.com.

See Sedgwick Claims Mgmt. Servs. v. Norwood, 2015 Ore. App. LEXIS 1625 (Dec. 30, 2015) [2015 Ore. App. LEXIS 1625 (Dec. 30, 2015)]

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 22.02 [22.02]

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see http://www.workcompwriter.com/oregon-court-says-walking-to-post-office-isnt-recreational-just-because-employee-enjoyed-the-activity/

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

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