## Facts

- Terry L. Smothers worked for Gresham Transfer, Inc. as a lube technician in the employer’s truck shop.
- The employer washed trucks adjacent to Smothers’s work area using an acidic mixture, and Smothers alleged the employer negligently allowed acid mist and fumes to drift into the shop.
- Smothers alleged resulting physical injuries, including harm to his respiratory system, skin, teeth, and joints.
- Smothers sought workers’ compensation benefits, but the insurer denied the claim and an administrative law judge upheld the denial because the work exposure was not the “major contributing cause,” so the condition was not a statutory “compensable injury.”
- Smothers then sued the employer in a common-law negligence action for damages.
- The circuit court dismissed the negligence complaint, ruling that ORS 656.018’s exclusive-remedy provision immunized the employer.
- The Oregon Court of Appeals affirmed; the Oregon Supreme Court granted review on the Oregon Constitution’s remedy clause.

## Issues

1. Whether Article I, section 10 of the Oregon Constitution protects substantive common-law rights (not merely access to courts) by guaranteeing a remedy for injury to those rights.
2. Whether applying ORS 656.018(1) to bar an employee’s negligence claim violates Article I, section 10 when the alleged work-related injury is not “compensable” under the workers’ compensation statutes and yields no statutory benefit.
3. Whether the workers’ compensation system supplies a constitutionally sufficient substitute remedy (quid pro quo) in this noncompensable-injury setting.

## Decision

- The Oregon Supreme Court reversed the Court of Appeals and the circuit court and remanded for further proceedings on Smothers’s negligence claim.
- The court held that Article I, section 10 protects the right to a remedy for injuries to common-law rights recognized when the Oregon Constitution was adopted (or analogous later-created rights).
- The court held that, as applied, ORS 656.018(1) unconstitutionally immunized employers from negligence liability for work-related injuries for which the workers’ compensation law provides no remedy.

## Legal Principles

- Article I, section 10 protects a person’s right to obtain a remedy for injury to rights recognized at common law in 1857, and for analogous injuries to legislatively created rights.
- The legislature may alter or abolish a common-law cause of action only if it provides an adequate substitute remedy for the abolished right (a quid pro quo).
- Workers’ compensation exclusivity is constitutionally permissible for injuries for which the statutory scheme provides a remedy.
- An employer may not invoke ORS 656.018(1) to bar a negligence action when the worker’s injury is work-related but noncompensable under the statutory definition and the workers’ compensation law provides no benefit for that injury.

## Conclusion

Because Smothers alleged a type of common-law injury for which the workers’ compensation system provided no remedy, the court held that applying workers’ compensation exclusive-remedy immunity to bar his negligence claim violated Oregon’s remedy clause and required reversal and remand.


Smothers v. Gresham Transfer, Inc., 332 Or. 83, 23 P.3d 333 (Or. 2001)