Georgia’s COA Applies Supreme Court’s Overruling of Lunch Break Exception

Written by Daniel Richardson, Esq.

Last year the Georgia Supreme Court addressed the collision of two separate lines of precedent that the Court of Appeals had been trying to hold together with confusing results. This involved (1) the Scheduled Break Exception and (2) the Ingress and Egress Rule. In 1935, the Supreme Court first enunciated the idea of a lunch break exception to compensability. A worker was injured while walking down steps to the basement of his work site to eat his lunch during a break. Because the employee’s “preparation for lunch and his eating lunch was his individual affair,” the injury “arose out of his individual pursuit and not out of his employment”. Ocean Acc. & Guar. Corp. v. Farr, 180 Ga. 266 (1935). The Court of Appeals developed this principle through subsequent case law, until it was overruled last year by the Supreme Court.

In a parallel line of cases, the Ingress and Egress Rule developed, carving out several exceptions to the Scheduled Break Exception. The period of employment generally includes a reasonable time for ingress to and egress from the place of work, while on the employer’s premises. For example, an injury was held to be compensable when an employee was injured while walking to her parked car at the end of the workday. Fed. Ins. Co. v. Coram, 95 Ga. App. 622 (1957). The Court of Appeals reasoned that “going to and from the parking lot in order to reach and leave her immediate working area was a necessary incident to the claimant’s employment.” Id.

In Frett v. State Farm Employee Workers’ Compensation, 309 Ga. 44 (2020), these two principles conflicted. The employee in Frett had a mandatory, unpaid 45-minute lunch break, at which time she was free to do as she wished, including leaving the office. On the day of her accident, the employee went to the breakroom, microwaved her food, began to exit, and slipped and fell on water inside the breakroom. The Supreme Court reasoned that the Act provides for compensation for injuries that occur “in the course of” employment AND “arise out of” employment, two separate prerequisites.

An injury arises “in the course of” employment when it “occurs within the period of the employment, at a place where the employee may be in the performance of her duties and while she is fulfilling or doing something incidental to those duties.” Hennly v. Richardson, 264 Ga. 355 (1994). Such incidental activities would include eating a meal, using the restroom, and ingress and egress to the place of work while on the employer’s premises. In Frett, the Court reasoned that “[i]t is clear that Frett was injured during an ordinary lunch break in the middle of her workday in a breakroom provided by her employer for the use of employees during such breaks.” The Court had no trouble in finding that the first prerequisite was met under these circumstances.

The “arising out of” prerequisite deals, instead, with causation. “An injury arises ‘out of’ the employment when a reasonable person, after considering the circumstances of the employment, would perceive a causal connection between the conditions under which the employee must work and the resulting injury.” Henlly, 264 Ga. at 356. Notwithstanding the Farr precedent, the Supreme Court reasoned that the second prerequisite should also be straightforward under the facts of Frett. “It is undisputed that Frett was injured when she slipped and fell on the wet floor of the breakroom on her employer’s premises. It logically follows that her injury was causally connected[.]”

The Court overruled the longstanding Farr precedent, criticizing the earlier decision for conflating the two prerequisites and leaving off the analysis of causation altogether. The Court found the facts of Farr and Frett to be very similar, and under both sets of circumstances found the accident should be compensable. The Ingress and Egress Rule was applied, and we no longer have the bright-line Scheduled Break Exception that the Court of Appeals had tried to set forth below in Frett.

The Court of Appeals is currently dealing with the ramifications of Farr having been overruled.  In Daniel v. Bremen-Bowdon Investment Co., 348 Ga. App. 803 (2019), an employee left her workstation for a regularly scheduled lunch break and planned to drive home. She was parked in a lot owned by her employer, but it was necessary for her to walk down a public sidewalk and across the street to access the lot. As she walked to her car, she tripped on the sidewalk and was injured.

Two years ago, the Court of Appeals decided the Daniel case one way, applying the Scheduled Break Exception and denying compensability. But considering last year’s Supreme Court ruling in Frett, the Court of Appeals has now reversed itself. In a decision last week, the Court of Appeals found that this accident resulted in an injury which both arose out of and was in the course of her employment. The Court applied the Ingress and Egress Rule to reach this decision. Employers cannot expect to avoid the compensability of accidents occurring when employees are going on or coming off a break, taking a break on the premises, or even when the accident occurs off the premises, as in Daniel. The outcome is likely to be fact-dependent in each specific case.