Virginia: Employee’s Injury Crossing Street from Parking Lot Not Compensable

Where a claimant’s injury occurred on a public street as she crossed from one of several parking lots provided by the employer to her workplace, her injuries did not arise out of and in the course of her employment, held a state appellate court. Quoting Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, current § 13.04, the court acknowledged that under Virginia’s “extended premises” rule, employment cannot be rigidly limited by the walls of the specific place that constitutes the workplace. The court noted two types of exceptions: (1) employer-controlled parking lots and (2) common stairs, elevators, lobbies, vestibules, concourses, etc., where the employer could be said to have a "right of passage”—a virtual easement. With regard to the second exception, the passage way used must be the sole and exclusive way of ingress and egress with no other way, or where the way of ingress and egress is constructed by the employer. Here the employer had no such "right of passage" across the street. Moreover, the claimant could have parked in several other designated areas which would not have required her to cross the public street.

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 Washington v. Honeywell Int'l, Inc., 2017 Va. App. LEXIS 264 (Oct. 24, 2017)

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

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