Pennsylvania: High Court Continues Broad Definition of Employer’s “Premises”

The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania continued to define an employer’s “premises” broadly, indicating the term must be understood to include any area that is integral to an employer’s business operations, including reasonable means of ingress or egress from the employee’s workplace. Accordingly, the Court affirmed a decision by the state’s Commonwealth Court that had approved of workers’ compensation benefits to an airline employee who sustained injuries while riding in a shuttle bus from the airline terminal to a parking lot on the grounds of the airport that was owned by the City of Philadelphia. That the airline owned neither the shuttle bus nor the parking lot was not a bar to recovery, said the Court. Under 77 Pa. Stat. § 411(1), the term “premises” should be construed liberally.

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 US Airways, Inc. v. Workers’ Comp. Appeal Bd. (Bockelman), 2019 Pa. LEXIS 6526 (Nov. 20, 2019)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 13.04.

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

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see

Sign up for the free LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation enewsletter at www.lexisnexis.com/wcnews.