Oregon: Traveling Employee’s Death While Returning from Shopping Trip Was Not Compensable

A person in the status of a traveling employee is continuously within the course and scope of the employment while traveling, except when the person is engaged in a distinct departure on a personal errand, held the Court of Appeals of Oregon. Accordingly, where Coos Bay resident was temporarily working some distance away in Newport, and was killed in an automobile accident as he and a co-employee returned to their Newport hotel following a Christmas shopping excursion to a nearby town, the employee’s surviving spouse was not entitled to workers’ compensation death benefits. Quoting Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, current § 25.01, et seq., extensively, the Court stressed that here the employee’s activities were unrelated to the employee’s work-related travels.

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 Beaudry v. SAIF Corp., 2017 Ore. App. LEXIS 1179 (Oct. 4, 2017)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 25.01.

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

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see