Fatal Fight At Work: Claim Against Employer

Greymouth Evening Star, 11 March 1949, Page 4

Fatal Fight At Work: Claim Against Employer

(P.A.) WELLINGTON, This Day. Argument was continued in the Court of Appeal today in the claim for £3500 damages relating to the death of Eric William Rutherford, who died following head injuries received in a fight with a fellow boiler attendant, Reginald Stewart Wilkins, in the boiler room of the Napier Hospital in June, 1947. Mr Leicester, counsel for the Napier Hospital Board, submitted that as a matter of law the case had to be considered from two separate and distinct'aspects: First, the alleged breach of duty of the board towards its employee, Rutherford, in failing to exercise such proper control and supervision as would have prevented or obviated the possibility of his being struck. Secondly, the liability of the board for an act of striking alleged to arise sut of and in the course of Wilkins’s employment and to constitute an improper mode of performing some part of the duty owed by him to the board. Before there was liability on the board, counsel maintained, it must have committed a breach of the duty which the law recognised. “The obligation of the employer to his employee is to provide a safe system of working and does not extend as a legal duty to interference in the various personal differences and resentments that exist between m’en who work together.”

Mr WiUis, counsel for the widow of the deceased, submitted that the employer was liable 'or the consequences of any wrongful act of my employee acting within the scope of his employment. The question whether or not .he employee was acting within this scope in any given circumstances was a question of fact for the jury. Mr Willis added that the findings of the jury on the question of fact could not be set aside, unless there was no evidence to support the findings. In the present case the jury had found that the act of striking arose, not pnly in the course of the employment of an employee of the board but also out of that employment. Counsel maintained that there was ample evidence for the jury to support such a finding, since the argument which led to the fatal fight between Rutherford and Wilkins had relation to the work- on which both were employed. The fight therefore rrose .from and in the course of their employment. __