A Treatise of Wyoming Workers' Compensation
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A Treatise of Wyoming Workers’ Compensation Law First Edition Michael C. Duff Professor of Law University of Wyoming College of Law CALI eLangdell® Press 2019 About the Author Michael C. Duff, a Professor at the University of Wyoming College of Law since 2006, is a Vice Chair of the Workers’ Compensation Committee of the American Bar Association’s Tort Trial and Insurance Practice Section and a fellow of both the American Bar Foundation and the Pound Civil Justice Institute. In 2017, Professor Duff was elected a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance, where he currently serves as a member of the workers’ compensation data panel. Professor Duff is widely considered one of the leading national experts on workers’ compensation systems and is quoted frequently by the national press. He has written extensively on various complex labor and employment matters, including preemption issues emerging from the interplay of Title I of the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) and state workers’ compensation systems. He is also a nationally recognized expert and commentator on labor issues arising from the National Labor Relations Act and has been quoted on labor law matters in various national publications including the Guardian, Bloomberg, the Huffington Post, the Nation, ThinkProgress, and In These Times. Professor Duff is the author of a workers’ compensation textbook and the co-author of a labor law textbook, both published by Carolina Academic Press. Professor Duff teaches the University of Wyoming College of Law’s courses in Torts I, Labor Law, Workers’ Compensation Law, and Bankruptcy. He has also taught Administrative Law, Evidence, Alternative Dispute Resolution in the Workplace, Introduction to Law, and Employee Benefits Law. An experienced legal practitioner, Professor Duff spent nearly a decade working as an attorney, adjudicative official, and investigator in various National Labor Relations Board offices immediately prior to joining the University of Wyoming College of Law’s faculty. Before engaging in federal government law practice, Professor Duff worked for two years as an associate attorney in a high-volume, progressive law firm in Maine—McTeague, Higbee & MacAdam—where he represented injured workers and labor unions. In his fifteen-year work life preceding the study of the law, Professor Duff was for eleven years a Teamsters’ Union shop steward and blue-collar ramp service worker in the airline industry, leaving that occupation in 1992 to focus on the study of labor law at the Harvard Law School. 1 Notices This is the first edition of A Treatise of Wyoming Workers’ Compensation Law, updated November, 2019. Visit https://www.cali.org/the-elangdell-bookstore for the latest version and for revision history. This work by Michael C. Duff is licensed and published by CALI eLangdell Press under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). CALI and CALI eLangdell Press do not assert copyright in US Government works or other public domain material included herein. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available through [email protected]. In brief, the terms of that license are that you may copy, distribute, and display this work, or make derivative works, so long as • you give CALI eLangdell Press and the author credit; • you do not use this work for commercial purposes; and • you distribute any works derived from this one under the same licensing terms as this. Suggested attribution format for original work: Michael C. Duff, A Treatise of Wyoming Workers’ Compensation Law, Published by CALI eLangdell Press. 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CALI disclaims all liability to any person for any loss caused by errors or omissions in this collection of information. 2 About CALI eLangdell Press The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI®) is: a nonprofit organization with over 200 member US law schools, an innovative force pushing legal education toward change for the better. There are benefits to CALI membership for your school, firm, or organization. ELangdell® is our electronic press with a mission to publish more open books for legal education. How do we define "open?" • Compatibility with devices like smartphones, tablets, and e-readers; as well as print. • The right for educators to remix the materials through more lenient copyright policies. • The ability for educators and students to adopt the materials for free. Find available and upcoming eLangdell titles at elangdell.cali.org. Show support for CALI by following us on Twitter, and by telling your friends and colleagues where you received your free book. 3 Acknowledgements To: My beloved family: Victoria, Isabel, and Daniel With respect to the creation of this volume, I want to acknowledge the excellent and hard work of my principal student research assistants, John Hornbaker IV and Jeremy Meerkreebs, who are destined to be great lawyers. Thanks are also due to my former students (and now lawyers) Nathan Ridgway and Christopher Brennan, who performed important research on early chapter drafts. I am also grateful for the help I have received along the way from a group of Wyoming practitioners, who are almost impossibly generous with their time in responding to my frequent pinpoint practice questions. Nevertheless, in a work of this kind, there will doubtless be errors—even when supported by such an outstanding team. And all errors are mine and mine alone. MCD 4 Contents ABOUT THE AUTHOR ...................................................................................... 1 NOTICES............................................................................................................... 2 ABOUT CALI ELANGDELL PRESS ................................................................ 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................. 4 1 INTRODUCTION TO THE WYOMING WORKERS’ COMPENSATION ACT .................................................................................... 11 1.1 History and Purpose of Workers’ Compensation ......................................... 11 1.2 History and Purpose of Wyoming Workers’ Compensation ........................ 13 1.3 Uniqueness of Wyoming’s Workers’ Compensation Statute ........................ 14 1.4 Fault is Irrelevant Under Wyoming Statute ................................................. 17 1.5 Exclusive Remedy Rule Generally ............................................................... 17 1.6 Exclusive Remedy Rule in Wyoming ........................................................... 18 1.7 Co-Employee Immunity Generally .............................................................. 21 1.8 Co-Employee Liability in Wyoming ............................................................. 22 2 PERSONS COVERED BY THE WYOMING WORKERS’ COMPENSATION ACT .................................................................................... 24 2.1 Who is an Employee? ................................................................................... 24 2.2 Who is an Employee Under the Wyoming Workers’ Compensation Act? .... 24 2.3 Undocumented Workers in Wyoming .......................................................... 27 2.4 Extraterritoriality in Wyoming .................................................................... 30 2.5 Joint Employee in Wyoming ........................................................................ 30 2.6 Employee Definitions Not Interchangeable in Wyoming .............................. 30 2.7 Wyoming Independent Contractor Law ...................................................... 31 5 2.8 Tort Law versus Workers’ Compensation Law Generally ........................... 34 2.9 Restatement Second of Agency Test (National) ............................................ 34 2.10 National Flurry of “Gig Laws” in 2018 ........................................................ 36 2.11 ABC Approach (National) ........................................................................... 38 2.12 Who is an Employer in Wyoming? .............................................................. 39 2.13 Wyoming-Specific Employer Inclusions ....................................................... 39 2.14 Employers in Wyoming Sometimes Not Specifically Defined ....................... 40 2.15 Contract of Hire in Wyoming ...................................................................... 41 2.16 Joint Employer in Wyoming ........................................................................ 41 2.17 Extrahazardous Employment Generally .....................................................