Vicarious Liability: Claims Against Employers

Vicarious Liability: Claims Against Employers

If you have an accident in the workplace you might be concerned about who you are claiming against. Sometimes an accident can be caused by a colleague in the workplace acting negligently and they themselves might not be insured to cover against these accidents and not have the money to compensate you for an injury suffered.

The law, therefore, provides a loophole to allow that where an employee acts negligently, their employer can be found to be ‘vicariously liable’. This means that instead of claiming against the employee directly the claimant can redirect their claim against the employer provided the negligent party were acting ‘in the course of employment’. The principle behind this is that because the employer in effect should control the actions of the employee within the working environment, it should be their responsibility to make sure that they provide a safe working environment.

That responsibility extends not only to providing safe offices/warehouses etc… but also to the conduct of employees and taking precautions to minimising the risk of injury.

A good example is the case of Harrison v Michelin Tyre Co Ltd. The claimant was injured at work while standing on a duckboard of his machine talking to a fellow employee. Another employee while pushing a truck in front of Harrison decided as a joke to turn the truck two inches outside the chalked lines of the passageway and push the edge of it under Harrison’s duckboard. The duckboard tipped up and Harrison fell suffering injury.

The judge in this case said that the test for determining vicarious liability was whether an employee’s act was incidental to their employment, even though it may have been unauthorised or prohibited or alternatively so far removed from their employment as to be plainly alien to it. Here the court found that the employer was vicariously liable and that the employee was acting in the course of their employment.