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Ignored Health Complaints
Can Cause Employers Pain
Connecticut employers can be held liable to their employees for negligent infliction of emotional distress and reckless misconduct.
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Business New Haven
1/27/2000
By: BNH
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The courts have so found in the cases of Malik v. Carrier Corp. and Von Tobel v. Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., respectively. In the former, the jury returned a verdict of $400,000 based upon a finding that one employee in the human resources department had acted in an unreasonable and perhaps retaliatory fashion. In the latter lawsuit, the judge ruled that a supervisor who had refused (twice in one day) to allow an employee to leave the job site to seek medical assistance for symptoms of a heart attack may have demonstrated a “reckless disregard for the just rights or safety of the [employee]” in such refusal. It should be noted that the employee's later diagnosis upon hospital admission was, in fact, a work-related heart attack.
A Rare Victory for Business
Joseph A. Wellington, a partner in the Waterbury-based law firm of Carmody & Torrance, recently won a remarkable victory before the OSHA Review Commission regarding the definition of “exposure” in the context of jeopardizing an employee's safety on a job-site.
In its decision in Secretary of Labor v. Fabricated Metal Products Inc., the commission found that in order for there to be exposure to harm in the workplace, the Labor Secretary must demonstrate not merely theoretical exposure to harm, but a reasonable likelihood that such harm would occur. In this case, the safety issue was a power press with exposed point of operation (gears) whose hazards, while potential, were insufficiently probable to cite the employer for OSHA violations.
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