Family Reportedly Seeks Negligence Carve-Out to Exclusivity

Tuesday, November 7, 2023 | 0

The family of an Alaska worker who died in a 2016 crash is trying to build support for a law that would allow civil lawsuits against employers if their negligence caused an injury or death, according to a report by Alaska Public Media.

Molly Parks, 18, and Marie Glesbrecht, 19, worked for the Petersburg Parks and Recreation Department. They were riding in a van when the driver suffered a seizure and drove through a guardrail.

The driver was convicted of manslaughter, but the Parks family lost a wrongful death lawsuit alleging that the department knew the driver suffered seizures. The wrongful death lawsuit failed because the family was not able to prove that the department intended to hurt the victims of the crash, so workers’ compensation was their exclusive remedy.

The state Supreme Court in a February decision said workers’ compensation is the exclusive remedy for workplace injuries and deaths unless the employer committed an intentional tort. Intentional torts are not part of the so-called “grand bargain” because the goal of workers’ compensation systems would not be furthered by allowing someone who committed an intentional tort to use exclusive remedy as a shield against liability, the court said in Estate of Molly Parks v. Petersburg Borough.

The court said case law requires a specific intent to cause an injury in order to avoid exclusivity and that it is “insufficient to assert an intentional act having a substantial certainty of harm absent a specific intent to harm.”

The high court acknowledged the tragedy of the preventable deaths and the “harshness of the resulting low compensation available for the workplace death of an employee without dependents,” but declined to depart from precedent.

The Parks family is reportedly developing legislation that would allow civil lawsuits when the negligence of an employer creates a situation that injures or kills a worker.