PITTSBURGH - A Pennsylvania workplace injury law that gives employees four years to sue over exposure to dangerous materials doesn't prevent plaintiffs with asbestos-related diseases that developed long after that timeframe from going to court.
The state Supreme Court ruled 5-2 on Jan. 22 that the lawsuit brought by the Estate of William Herold, which names dozens of defendants in the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas, can proceed against the University of Pittsburgh.
Justice Debra Todd and four of her colleagues agreed with lower courts in finding the four-year limit on claims under the Occupational Disease Act is not absolute. Herold, a stationary engineer at Pitt for 38 years, was diagnosed with mesothelioma 15 years after his last workplace exposure.
He died three years later, after his lawsuit had been filed. Pitt argued his mesothelioma was an occupational disease, subject to an exclusivity provision in the ODA. Three courts have now agreed that the ODA defines an occupational disease as one that occurs within the last four years of exposure.
Todd's opinion works its way through centuries of workplace disease law, specifically the 1915 "Grand Bargain" that established the Workers' Compensation Act. It made it easier for injured employees to find relief through Workers' Comp while limiting their ability to sue their employer.
Having the ODA as the exclusive remedy in Herold's case would leave his estate with no other avenues for recovery against Pitt, given the four-year statute of limitations.
"If the ODA is interpreted to shield an employer from all potential liability, the quid pro quo would be vitiated," Todd wrote. "When there is no possibility of compensation, the Grand Bargain is no bargain.
"Moreover, leaving such employees with no remedy against his or her employer contravenes the ODA's intended purpose."
Key to the plaintiff's claim was a 2013 ruling called Tooey. The state Supreme Court decided then that a 300-week period prescribed by the Workers' Compensation Act doesn't keep an employee from suing an employer.
Plaintiff John Tooey similarly developed mesothelioma long after his last exposure at Ferro Engineering. Given mesothelioma's long latency period, which can be several decades, the time limit to sue in the WCA was a "de facto exclusion of coverage under the Act for essentially all mesothelioma claims," the court wrote then.
Plaintiffs attorneys hailed the Tooey decision as a major victory for workers. Their statewide association - the Pennsylvania Association for Justice - filed a brief in support of Herold's case.
If the ODA prevented Herold from suing his employer in civil court and instead required a Workers' Comp claim, it would cause workers to pursue "obviously futile claims in the Workers' Compensation system before pursuing a negligence claim" and that would "have disastrous practical implications," the PAJ wrote.
Pitt tried to convince the Supreme Court that the Tooey decision involved language in the WCA that doesn't exist in the ODA. But now that all courts have rejected that argument, Herold's claim against Pitt moves forward in Pittsburgh state court - and not the Workers' Comp system.
Justices Kevin Brobson and David Wecht disagreed with the majority and each filed a dissenting opinion. Both decried the Tooey decision, with Wecht calling it "simply wrong."
"The Tooey Court decided that the General Assembly intended to allow workers whose claims are barred by the manifestation requirement to sue their employers in tort," Wecht wrote. "That decision was incorrect.
"It cannot be squared with the ODA's parallel manifestation requirement, which clearly demonstrates that the legislature did intend to deny some occupational disease claimants both a civil and an administrative remedy."