When An Employer Becomes Responsible For An Employee’s Negligence

An employer and an employee have an unwritten agreement. It is the employee’s job to respond to the employer’s requests. Still, any employees that get injured while carrying-out an act that does represent part of the agreement remain unable to hold the respective employers liable for their injuries.

Further details on vicarious liability

Vicarious liability defines the legality of a personal injury charge against someone that did not commit the injurious act. A doctor faces such a charge if a nurse or other member of a hospital staff has been directed to perform a harmful procedure. An employer can be hit with a charge of vicarious liability for directing an employee to perform a harmful procedure.

Can anyone that responds to an order in a workplace, an order given by someone in a position of authority, enter a personal injury claim, if that same order results in the hurting of other people? No, as per Personal Injury Lawyer in Waterloo an independent contractor could not enter such a claim. Independent contractors do not have an agreement with their employers, at least not one that might force them to respond to an order from the head of a company or a department.

Can anyone that gets injured during working hours proceed to file charges against a boss? No, the injury had to be caused by the employee’s commission of work-related duties. It could not be something that happened when the employee’s own whims had directed his or her actions.

Furthermore, an employer’s directions cannot be pointed to as the cause for an accident, if some natural force had acted on the worker that was following those same directions. For instance, the head of an organization could not be blamed for an injury that a worker suffered, if an earthquake had rattled the ground, while the worker was doing his or her assigned task.

Was the worker’s problem not caused by a readiness to honor the employer-employee agreement?

Yes, it was. The statement made above, which suggested the occurrence of an earthquake, at a time when some employee’s task put him or her in a perilous position, reflected one judge’s opinion. If the same situation were to develop again, causing a case to be brought to court, a different judge might have a different ruling.

Still, in Ontario a judge would face certain limitations. Ontario’s Insurance Act limits the damages awarded to any workers that claim to have suffered a loss, when a boss issued an order that proved harmful. In other words, an employee’s ability to profit from a charge of vicarious liability, one made against a superior, does come with some very real and unavoidable limits.