COLUMBUS, Ohio - The Ohio Supreme Court on Tuesday delivered a huge victory for business and insurance companies and a loss to
injured workers.
In two separate but related decisions, the court ruled that a 2005 state law restricting lawsuits workers injured on the job can bring against their employers is constitutional.
The rulings mean injured workers -- who remain entitled to receiving workers' compensation benefits through the state -- will have a much more difficult time bringing injury cases against private employers.
Both cases were decided by 6-to-1 votes. Chief Justice Thomas Moyer and justices Maureen O'Connor, Robert Cupp, Evelyn Lundberg Stratton, Terrence O'Donnell, and Judith Ann Lanzinger were in the majority.
Justice Paul Pfeifer dissented.
"Employee victims who can establish under the statute that their injuries were caused by their employer's deliberate intent may recover for an intentional tort," Cupp wrote for the majority, explaining that the window for an injured worker to sue is still open, just not as wide.
The law outlines specific instances in which an injured worker would be eligible to sue and places a larger of burden of proof on the worker. That doesn't make much sense to Pfeifer, who said the ruling will cut off injured workers seeking the right to a fair hearing.
The law "restricts employees' constitutional rights to a remedy and to open courts," Pfeifer wrote in his dissent. The law "purports to grant employees the right to bring intentional-tort actions against their employers, but in reality defines the cause of action into oblivion."
At issue is the state's workers' compensation law that has been tinkered with by the legislature several times since it was created in 1912. The original law mandated that injured workers get compensated through the state's workers' compensation law.
But in the 1980s, a general law allowing workers to sue for "workplace intentional tort" for more substantial awards emerged. The legislature altered the law several times to limit the type of workplace accidents or injuries workers could sue for beyond their workers' compensation benefits.
But the Supreme Court in 1991 and again in 1999 -- with a different makeup of justices from today -- said those previous laws were unconstitutional.
The legislature took another shot at it in 2005, again changing the law to limit such suits. The Supreme Court heard two challenges to the law, and this time in both cases the justices say the legislature got it right.
Kaminski vs. Metal & Wire Products Co. in Columbiana County and Stetter vs. R.J. Corman Derailment Services in Wood County each involved injured workers who wanted to bring their cases under the former rules by challenging the legality of the 2005 law change.
"To accept petitioners' view of the statute, we must ignore the history of employer intentional-tort law in Ohio and the dynamic between the General Assembly's attempts to legislate in this area and this court's decisions reacting to those attempts," Cupp wrote in the Stetter case.
"Instead, we find (the law) embodies the General Assembly's intent to significantly curtail an employee's access to common-law damages," Cupp stated.
Pfeifer said there is little difference between the old law and the 2005 revision and questioned how the majority could come to a conclusion that differed from previous Supreme Court decisions.
"Both versions eliminate a meaningful remedy for injured workers in egregious cases. Both eliminate an employee's right to seek damages, including punitive damages, in a court of law. And both remove an important check on employer behavior," he wrote for the Stetter case.
The previous version "is as distinguishable from the current version as a pig with lipstick is distinguishable from a pig without," Pfeifer wrote. "That one version is cosmetically different from the other is irrelevant."