Also of note, this guy had been working for the same Coca-Cola bottling plant in Alberta for 35 years!
He had repeatedly warned supervisors and maintenance staff about defects in a 907 kg overhead sliding door, but nothing was done. Then the door fell on him, seriously injuring his neck, shoulder, and arm. It looks like he may never regain use of one arm.
Shortly after, while painfully recovering, he got a phone call telling him not to bother showing up for work because he was fired.
When the company let Hopkins go, it cited a rarely-used legal doctrine [called "frustration of employment] that lets employers terminate a worker if an unexpected situation makes keeping them an “undue hardship” for the company. That’s something one legal expert says doesn’t make sense given the size of Coca-Cola Bottling.
Capitalism at its finest!
The company offered him a token $2,500 for crippling him after 35 years of service, provided he sign a non-disclosure and release them from liability. He refused. Hopefully he’ll sue the bastards for millions.
To be fair to the Coca-Cola company, Coca-Cola Canada Bottling Limited is a separate company from the main organization.
Hoo boy. I can see a lot of legal issues arising from this one, just from your description. Not just in a civil court, but also in a human rights action, and issues arising from a Worker’s Comp claim. Plus, there could be issues arising from Short Term Disability/Long Term Disablity insurance.
No further comment for now. I’d like to get more information.
Yes, my first thought was, “but that’s why we have workers comp”. It’s not that unusual for workers to be injured in ways that make them totally unable to do that (or any) job. And what routinely happens is that their employer’s workers comp policy pays their related medical costs and replacement of their wages (usually 60%), often for the rest of their life. It was invented by companies in high-risk industries (like logging) that were tired of litigating whose fault it was each time an employee was seriously injured.
There’s something missing from this story.
Edited to add: Oops this is in Canada. I don’t know Canadian law.
Canadian law is similar. Workers Comp aims for the same standard of living but you might needs to change jobs. An electrician that can no longer crawl under a house to wire it after an on the job injury can likely still perform other jobs.
Yeah, same in the US, if you can no longer do that job, but can do some other job, you are expected to do that. But a series neck injury can forestall a lot of jobs.
Some of the comments here seem to be missing some key issues:
The accident appeared to be the company’s fault to begin with, for ignoring the employee’s warnings about a heavy overhead door in a poor state of repair
It’s a company of 6,000 employees that fired him based on an obscure legal loophole that keeping him on would cause them “undue hardship”.
But he’s quite capable of office work, just not manual labour – he’s not disabled except for one arm that may be permanently dysfunctional. Read the article – he’s trying to retrain himself for office work. But despite 35 years of service, the company says they have nothing for him.
This is a travesty – the company is treating a 35-year veteran employee still willing and capable of being productive like a broken machine that they’ve decided to scrap.
Did you read the article? Labour lawyers apprised of all the facts are calling this action by the company “abhorrent”.
Wow if that event happened at ford or Gm in Nj he would have an excellent case and lawyers would welcome his case ! I should his outcome would work favorably for him!
The article says his claim with the Alberta Workman’s Comp Board (WCB) was accepted and:
The WCB typically pays injured workers about 90 per cent of their take-home pay before the injury, up to a yearly maximum until they are 65.
If he gets a lesser paying job, they will make up the difference. Currently he is training and looking for a one-handed typing office job.
The union is also supporting him and he has hired a lawyer. Hopefully he gets some restitution. Shameful that they didn’t stand by him while he was rebuilding his life. It would have been cheaper for them in the long run.
A serious question about Canadian law that I don’t want to see sidetracked into a debate on public healthcare.
Canada has a public healthcare system. So presumably Shawne Hopkins’ medical care for his injury will be covered by that and he will not being paying those expenses out of pocket.
Here in America, we don’t have a public healthcare system. So Hopkins would have to pay for his medical care. This would usually mean he would get a lawyer and they would take the bottling company to court to try to prove they were responsible for the injury. If they were successful, the company would be ordered to pay for Hopkins’ medical care as the party that was responsible for the injury.
As I noted above, this isn’t an issue in Alberta. There was never a question of Hopkins or the bottling company paying for the medical care.
Enough preamble; here’s my question. Do Canadian companies look at liability differently than American companies because of this? If an American company had received reports of a malfunctioning overhead door, would the accountants have run the numbers and said “It would cost five thousand dollars to fix that door. But if that door falls on somebody, we’ll have to pay a million dollars in medical expenses. Therefore it makes financial sense for us to repair the door in order to avoid the risk of that larger expense.” Whereas a Canadian company’s accountants would say “It would cost five thousand dollars to fix that door. If we don’t fix the door, it may fall on somebody. But if it does, the government will pay for the resulting medical expenses. Therefore we have no financial incentive to pay to fix the door.”
Are Canadian companies more tolerant of employee injury risks than American companies because they don’t have to worry about potential medical costs?
I’m going to guess that since most American companies have Workers Compensation insurance, just as in Canada, that logic about medical costs in that situation wouldn’t apply any more than it does in Canada. The only real difference is that in Canada loss of income and benefits is the main driver of WC insurance costs, whereas in the US medical costs tend to dominate.
Who pays is much more complicated than you’d think, and varies by province. In BC, I was recently asked if I was at the hospital for a workplace injury. I wasn’t, so I don’t know why they asked, but it might well be that the employer is billed in a way they wouldn’t be for a leisure-time injury.
Medical costs are typically borne by the provincial Workers Compensation board rather than the universal health care system and companies rates are affected by claims, so it does matter.
I believe this is correct, but for a variety of reasons, including lower medical provider costs, Workers Compensation insurance costs substantially less in Canada than it does in the US.
The results from a regression analysis adjusting for all these factors estimated that net workers’ compensation costs per worker per week were approximately 49 per cent lower in British Columbia than in the United States and about 30 per cent lower in Ontario.
This is not true. As he was unambiguously injured on the job, his medical care would be paid for by his employer’s workers compensation policy. If he sued at all (and most injured employees don’t) he would only be suing for pain and suffering, and maybe for his wife’s loss of consortium, if applicable. The replacement wages and medical care are treated as no-fault, and are covered so long as you were working. It doesn’t matter whether it’s your fault or the employer’s fault.
Now, it is true that employers pay a larger WC premium if their employees have a lot of injuries. And many employers are given specific advice of how to change their operations by their workers compensation insurer. (Big insurance companies have whole departments of “loss control specialists”.) And maybe the insurance company would have had more pull than a random employee in getting the company to address the issue if the unsafe door.
If you’ve ever been treated medically for an injury, and you were asked if it happened at work, this is why. Your health insurer is trying to avoid paying by dumping the cost on the WC carrier.
Right, it’s workers comp preemption. There are lawyers who do nothing else, but it’s not a case that general PI attorneys would be interested in. And, to nitpick, in the US an employee cannot sue for anything other than the remedies available under the workers compensation program. (minor and rare exceptions exist, but they’re minor and rare). No “pain and suffering,” no loss of consortium. It’s called the “grand bargain.” The worker gives up traditional remedies in exchange for what in theory should be fault free medical bills and wage loss payments.
Yes, and I literally work for the agency in my state that handles these things. I’ve also been personally injured on the job and gone through the process. People in the US are not stuck paying out of pocket for an on-the-job injury if the law is actually being followed.
I knew about Canadian worker’s comp thanks to a documentary I saw when I was young.
