WORKMAN’S COMPENSATION
A nurse tending tuberculous patients is entitled to workman’s compensation if she catches the disease, for TB is undeniably a hazard of her job. But what about a truck driver who contracts TB while confined in his cab with a constantly coughing helper?
Such was the fate of Julius Paider, driver of a Manhattan moving van. Ruling in his favor, the state workman’s compensation board declared that Paider’s sickness was “due to the nature of the employment.” But the New York State Supreme Court’s appellate division disagreed. Voiding Paider’s award, the court ruled that “it was the co-employee and not the occupation that caused the disease.”
Paider’s lawyers cited precedents in which compensation was awarded to a telephone operator who caught TB from a mouthpiece infected by another operator; and to a lab technician who had the same experience with a pipette. The court was not impressed. In those cases, it said, the claimants faced “special hazard” in using oral tools that were indispensable to their jobs. A truck cab bearing a tuberculous co-worker is no such “instrument of transmission.”
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