New York: School Paraprofessional's Civil Action Against Custodian Fails

A paraprofessional working at a Staten Island school, who sustained injuries when she slipped and fell on a wet floor in the school cafeteria, may not maintain a civil action in negligence against the school custodian engineer and a school custodial assistant since the claim is barred by the exclusive remedy provisions of the New York Workers’ Compensation Law. The court observed that the custodian engineer was employed by the New York City Department of Education and that the custodial assistant was, in turn, employed by the engineer. Since plaintiff was also a DOE employee, she and the defendants were “in the same employ” within the meaning of N.Y. Work. Comp. Law § 29[6].

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is the co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Lupton v. Pedersen, 2018 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 1069 (2d Dept., Feb. 14, 2018)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 111.03.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law