Injury From Usual Exertion or Exposure Concept

Defining Unusual "Injury From Usual Exertion or Exposure" Concept

Many states hinge compensability of an injury on whether it occurred "by accident." One method of characterizing an injury as "accidental" is to determine whether the injury arose due to the worker's usual exertion or exposure. The viability of this method has been criticized because it focuses on the accidental nature of the cause rather than the result, assumes that "unusual" equals "accidental," and is difficult to apply in everyday practice because there is really no stable baseline for what is "usual" or "unusual" in any given job.

The issue of "unusualness" has been substantially tested in the area of heart cases. Consider the scenario of a bicycle courier in a large city who suffers a heart attack while cycling up a hill on his regular delivery route. A strict unusual exertion test would likely preclude a recovery for workers' compensation benefits because the exertion was not unusual or catastrophic given that it was the courier's everyday occupational occurrence to cycle up the hill. Contrary to this is the more lenient approach exhibited in cases that held a heart injury was compensable even though caused by activities performed pursuant to the worker's daily job duties.

Identifying "unusual" and "usual" exertion or exposure did not end with the dichotomy of decisions following the strict and lenient approaches. Courts continue to struggle with a working definition of "unusual" when it comes to a worker's emotional strain that results in the injury. They ask whether the emotional strain was unusual as compared to the strain that normally affects the employee, the strain generally encountered in employment, or the strain generally encountered in everyday life outside of work. With respect to instances of sunstroke and freezing, the question becomes whether the exposure was usual for members of the general public.