| Employment Article Written by RC&A Shareholders Cited by Washington Supreme Court |
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Employment Article Written by RC&A Shareholders Cited by Washington Supreme Court
Washington D.C. 1/22/2003, 5:01:57 PM A member of the Washington Supreme Court has cited a law review article written by RC&A shareholders Mike Moberly and Carolann Cervetti in a recent employment law case, Robel v. Roundup Corp., 59 P.3d 611 (Wash. 2002). In Robel, the court upheld an award of damages to an employee who had not been terminated, but instead claimed to have been subjected to verbal and non-verbal harassment in retaliation for filing a workers’ compensation claim. The court based its ruling on a provision in Washington’s workers’ compensation statutes prohibiting employers from discriminating against employees who file such claims. Justice Bobbe Bridge dissented from the court’s ruling. She asserted that Washington’s workers’ compensation statutes do not provide a direct statutory cause of action to aggrieved employees. They instead have been interpreted to provide the requisite “public policy” necessary to support a common law wrongful discharge claim premised upon the public policy exception to the employment-at-will rule. Justice Bridge therefore concluded that the court’s ruling had effectively extended the wrongful discharge tort to encompass acts by employers that fall short of actual or constructive discharge. She maintained that this result was inconsistent with a prior decision in which the Washington Supreme Court refused to recognize a tort claim for wrongful transfer in violation of public policy. Justice Bridge also noted that the majority’s ruling was inconsistent with the result reached in similar cases decided in several other states, including two Arizona Court of Appeals decisions. Quoting Moberly and Cervetti’s article, The Nose of the Camel: Extending the Public Policy Exception Beyond the Wrongful Discharge Context, which analyzed both the Washington and Arizona cases on which she relied, Justice Bridge concluded her dissent by noting that although the public policy exception to the employment-at-will rule has been recognized in most states, “it rarely has been applied in cases involving employer actions other than discharge.” |