Vermont: Injured Worker’s AWW Includes College Employer’s “Tuition Benefit”

The Supreme Court of Vermont, in a divided decision, held that a college employer’s “tuition benefit” was a type of “other advantage,” as that term was used in 21 V.S.A. § 601(13), and accordingly was appropriately used by the Vermont Commissioner of Labor in computing the injured employee’s average weekly wage (AWW) for workers’ compensation purposes. Quoting Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the majority of Court drew a distinction between the tuition benefit, which had actually been utilized by the employee in the 26 weeks prior to the injury, and its earlier divided decision in Lydy v. Trustaff, Inc., 2013 VT 44, 194 Vt. 165, 76 A.3d 150, in which the Court held employer-provided health insurance benefits were not to be considered in computing AWW.

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 Haller v. Champlain College, 2017 VT 86, 2017 Vt. LEXIS 107 (Sept. 29, 2017)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 93.01.

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

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see