Federal: Temporal Relationship Between Injury and Termination is Insufficient to Establish Retaliatory Discharge

A federal district court reiterated that under Tennessee law, an employer may terminate an at-will employee who is unable to perform satisfactorily because of physical infirmity, even though the physical infirmity resulted from an on-the-job compensable accident. The fact that a worker’s injury was eventually held to be work-related did not change the fact that the employer was within its rights to terminate the worker after the injury caused the worker to miss 20 consecutive work days, and the worker remained, by both parties’ accounts, unable to perform the functions of his job. Moreover, to show that a plaintiff’s workers’ compensation claim was a substantial factor in his termination, a plaintiff must show either direct or “compelling circumstantial” evidence of a causal connection between the workers’ compensation claim and the termination, not just the fact that the latter followed the former.

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 Cantrell v. Yates Servs., LLC, 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 121512 (Sept. 8, 2016)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 104.07.

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