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Custer v. Hartford Insurance Co.8/23/2005
act thus eliminated courtroom contentions about fault between employer and employee while providing a modest but relatively definite remedy for workers injured on the job.
It hardly needs to be said that under the common law no employer had a duty to ensure that employees arrived home safely after work, regardless of the location of the work site. The statute similarly limited compensation to injuries arising "out of" and "in the course of" employment. Section 287.020.3. The act provides compensation only for injuries occurring during the employee's work at a place where the work required the worker to be. See Section 287.020.5. Thus neither the common law, the history of the act, nor the language of the act suggests that any portion of the act was aimed at adding a requirement that employers take responsibility for getting their employees safely home after the employees had finished work and had left the work premises.
Section 1.010 rebuts the notion that an act in derogation of the common law must be construed strictly. It cautions against the strict application of legal technicalities in a way that would undermine the purposes of the act. The Workers' Compensation Act, like all other statutes, is thus to be construed liberally to effectuate its true purposes. This would obviously mean construing the statute in a way that is not narrow and not begrudging and not with undue emphasis on technicalities, so that the purposes of the statute are not undermined.
In section 287.800, the legislature said the workers' compensation statute is to be construed liberally with a "view to the public welfare," choosing to use the exact phrase that had been used earlier with regard to interpretation of the terms of the Public Service Commission Act. The legislature did not say to construe the statute with a view to "claimant welfare." It is not clear that the phrase "public welfare" is always equivalent to "claimant welfare," though in any given case there may be practical overlap of these concepts.
Section 1.090 exhorts the courts to take the words and phrases of the statutes in their "plain or ordinary and usual sense." That principle can be applied harmoniously with the principle of liberal construction with a view to the public welfare.
Section 76 of the act provides that 'all of the provisions of this act shall be liberally construed with a view to the public welfare,' etc, evidently intending that the act shall be so construed as not to be unnecessarily restricted by a technical construction of the words used therein, but rather that such words be construed in the broader, popular sense.
Drecksmith v. Universal Carloading & Distrib. Co ., 18 S.W.2d 86, 87 (Mo. App. 1929). As the Missouri Supreme Court stated in 1933, liberal construction of the Workers' Compensation Act "does not authorize extending the terms of the act beyond what they plainly say." State ex rel. Sei v. Haid, 61 S.W.2d 950, 954 (Mo. 1933). Thus, there can be a type of liberal construction that is faithful to both the plain text and the purposes of the act. A few courts have suggested that a liberal construction "with a view to the public welfare" does not necessarily mean that the compensation proceedings must be biased in favor of the claimant. See, e.g. Reed v. Kansas City Wholesale Grocery Co., 156 S.W.2d 747 (Mo. App. 1941):
The liberal construction that is required [of the Workmen's Compensation law] is "with a view to the public welfare." This does not mean that any strained construction of the law should be made or allowed for the purpose of permitting an exorbitant award solely for private gain. This would clearly be opposed to the public welfare and the pu
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