Problems related to mental injury claims have not usually been resolved by specific provisions in the workers’ compensation statutes. Rather, state-agency adjudicatory officials or state court judges in appellate cases have resolved the issues in case decisions that have then become legal precedent. An example of a solution arrived at in some states has been a judicially imposed requirement that for an employee to receive workers’ compensation benefits for mental injuries, the employee must prove not only that his injuries were caused by work-related stress as opposed to stress from other sources, but also that the stress was caused by circumstances that were not common for the employee’s particular job. Thus, for example, a police officer would not be able to recover benefits for workplace stress caused by such very legitimate stress-causing factors as having her life in periodic danger and seeing horrific situations while on the job, since those stress-causing factors are a “normal” part of police work. Rather, she would have to show the existence of additional, unusual stress-causing factors at the workplace, such as constant abuse by a supervisor. While this type of judicial solution certainly addresses to at least some degree employer concerns that mental-injury claims cannot be made too easy to recover on, it remains a question as to whether this is the most fair and equitable way to resolve such claims.
A second current problem in workers’ compensation law is caused by the exclusivity provisions contained in virtually all workers’ compensation statutes when sexual harassment situations occur at a workplace. A common effect of sexual harassment upon victimized employees is serious emotional distress, certainly sufficient in many cases to support a state common-law claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress. As we have discussed in an earlier lesson, sexual harassment also is a basis for finding an employer liable for violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In response to court suits by sexual harassment plaintiffs who claimed that the sexual harassment was so severe that the plaintiffs were psychologically injured and disabled from working, employers were quick to assert that both the Title VII and state law emotional-distress claims in these situations must be dismissed on the grounds that the plaintiff’s exclusive remedy for a workplace injury was workers’ compensation. While this issue has never been resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court, the solution arrived at by most federal appellate courts has been that the exclusivity provisions of workers’ compensation statutes will bar state law claims stemming from mental workplace injuries even when caused by sexual harassment. However, based on the supremacy of federal over state law, workers’ compensation statutes have been held not to bar Title VII claims stemming from sexual harassment even when an effect of the harassment is a mental or physical workplace injury.