Affirming a decision made by the Court of Appeals, a majority ruling by the Washington Supreme Court has found that claimant Gary Walston is unable to sue his former employer, The Boeing Company, because of the Industrial Insurance Act (IIA), which is a provision to the state’s Workers’ Compensation law that utilizes a no-fault compensation system to protect employers against personal injury lawsuits. Mr. Walston, who was diagnosed with mesothelioma – an asbestos-related cancer – in 2010, sought compensation for having developed the disease while working in a hammer shop at Boeing.
Specifically, Mr. Walston alleged that he was exposed to the deadly toxin in 1985, when work crews were involved in a project to repair asbestos-containing pipe insulation above the hammer shop’s workstation. Although the workers attending to the insulation wore “moon suits,” Mr. Walston and his co-workers employees at the hammer shop were denied such protective equipment by their supervisors.
According to the Supreme Court’s ruling, Boeing was immune from lawsuit because Mr. Walston failed to raise a question of material fact regarding whether the company was certain that the employees’ asbestos exposure would result in bodily harm. Therefore, the injury fell under the umbrella of IIA.
The sole dissenting judge, Justice Charles Wiggins, argued that the majority’s ruling did not have the best interests of the employees in mind, and that encouraging workplace safety was a responsibility of the court. “[T]he court should be more, not less, vigilant in protecting workers when employers deliberately expose their workers to asbestos – a known deadly substance,” Wiggins wrote. He added, “The only way to deliberately produce the disease of mesothelioma is to intentionally and knowingly cause workers to inhale asbestos.”
Justice Wiggins also pointed out that the nature of mesothelioma – its lengthy latency period, in particular – makes it impossible to foresee how exposure to asbestos will affect each individual who is exposed. Addressing the unsatisfied requirements of the Workers’ Compensation law, Justice Wiggins wrote, “It would undermine the purpose of the statute if an employer could implant a ticking time bomb in an employee’s body and escape liability simply because the particular injury that resulted could not be predicted with absolute certainty.”