Montana: Warehouse Manager’s Dual Capacity Action Against Boss/Owner of Building Fails

A warehouse manager of a carpet company, who sustained injuries while assembling carpet racks in a newly constructed warehouse, could not maintain a civil action in negligence against the owners of the warehouse—a husband and wife—where the husband was the sole shareholder of the carpet company—and the warehouse manager’s supervisor—and the wife was the company’s secretary and treasurer. The manager’s contention that they should be liable individually in their capacity as owners of the building did not sway the court. It noted that at the time of the injury the carpet company was paying the manager, that the shareholder was supervising him, and that he had already recovered benefits under the workers’ compensation act. The trial court found the warehouse owners were acting in their capacity as co-employees of the warehouse manager and the appellate court agreed. The court added that the manager’s contention that the owners could be liable under the dual capacity doctrine was not well founded.  Noting the doctrine had been criticized in Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the court also indicated it had rejected the doctrine in an earlier decision.

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. Bracketed citations link to lexis.com.

See George v. Bowler, 2015 MT 209, 2015 Mont. LEXIS 393 (July 28, 2015) [2015 MT 209, 2015 Mont. LEXIS 393 (July 28, 2015)]

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 113.02 [113.02]

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

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