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Workers' Compensation: The Going and Coming Rule
All US states have adopted workers' compensation systems that pay benefits to employees for employment-related injuries and diseases. A body of law has evolved around the issue of compensation for injuries received when away from work, such as during the work commute; during offsite lunches, seminars, and classes; during business travel; or while performing work tasks at home. How should a benefit program designed to reimburse for work-related harm handle such claims?
The General Rule
The basic rule, dubbed the going and coming rule, is that an injury received during a typical work commute is not within the scope of employment and therefore not compensable as a workers' comp claim. An employer does not control his or her employee's actions during a commute and the benefit to the employer is viewed as beginning when the employee arrives at the workplace and begins to provide services. In essence, the employment relationship is usually interrupted while the employee is away from the workplace.
The rules for classifying injuries received while a worker is away from the worksite have developed from this basic concept: when at the time of injury a worker's activity benefits his or her employer or the employee is at greater risk than the general public because of his or her employment, the injury should be covered by workers' comp. Likewise, when at the time of injury an employee is away from work, not taking any risk greater than the average person, and engaging in activity of a personal nature, such as during a typical work commute, the law sees the injury as outside the purpose and reach of workers' compensation. Risks assumed by commuting employees are no greater than those assumed by other people traveling on public thoroughfares.
In summary, typically a workers' compensation claim will be denied if it occurred on the commute to work, on the commute home from work, or during a purely personal outing taken at some point in the workday, such as running personal errands during a lunch break. Many exceptions to this rule have evolved for special circumstances, as individual situations often combine business activity with personal matters during the same trip away from the main workplace.
Because the variations on the details of such scenarios are endless, the going and coming rule cannot be rigidly applied; rather, each case must be factually scrutinized in light of the applicable state's workers' compensation jurisprudence. A lawyer with knowledge of workers' compensation law in your state can advise you about what to expect and how to proceed in your particular claim, because the going and coming rule and its exceptions vary among the states.
Exceptions to the Rule
This article will touch briefly on three of the most common and important exceptions to the going and coming rule that may apply when some connection can be made between the injury and the injured worker's job or when the worker's trip bestowed some benefit to the employer.
The special mission, special errand, or special task exception applies to a commute or trip that includes an unusual work-related assignment that benefits the employer, such as an offsite errand for an employer on the way home from work. An often overlapping exception is the dual purpose doctrine. The dual purpose doctrine provides for workers' comp coverage for injury sustained during travel that has both work and personal goals, as long as the trip would not have been made without the business purpose.
A third common exception goes by many names: zone of employment, zone of danger, special risk, special hazard, proximity rule, or extended premises rule. In essence, for purposes of determining whether workers' comp should apply to an injury sustained in the vicinity of the workplace, the "workplace" is seen as encompassing the actual premises plus the surrounding zones of ingress to and egress from the premises where those zones may contain special hazards or dangers, such as busy roads or poorly maintained driveways. Sometimes the zone of employment includes adjacent land, either publicly or privately owned. The legal boundaries of the employer's premises may not exactly overlap with the zone of employment. For example, the zone of employment may extend beyond the employers' property to a place where the employer could have foreseen that employees would assume such route to be an appropriate way into or out of the work premises.
These are only three of many exceptions to the going and coming rule that may apply to your claim in workers' compensation.
The Going and Coming Rule in Workers' Comp: Important Factors to Consider
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The Going and Coming Rule in Workers' Comp: Important Factors to Consider
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