BENTON – Termination from a job might hurt but it didn’t count as bodily injury in a coverage dispute before Senior U.S. District Judge Phil Gilbert.
Gilbert granted judgment to Scottsdale Insurance on Jan. 4, finding it didn’t have to defend a wrongful termination suit in state court.
He found Scottsdale’s policy limited injury coverage to actual physical harm.
The policy covered a sawmill that James Burks operated in Vernon in 2015, when a machine severed three fingers from the left hand of employee Robert White.
White filed for workers’ compensation in March 2016, and Burks terminated his employment a month later.
White filed suit in Marion County circuit court in 2017, claiming Burks terminated him in retaliation for claiming workers’ compensation.
Burks tendered his defense to Scottsdale, which denied coverage and filed for declaratory judgment against Burks and White in district court.
Last October, Scottsdale counsel Jonathan Schwartz of Chicago moved for judgment on the pleadings.
He wrote that courts construing Illinois law have held that claims for wrongful termination allege monetary loss and not bodily injury.
He wrote that the primary purpose of a commercial liability policy is to protect businesses from third party liability as opposed to employee liability.
Attorney Christopher Daniels of Salem responded for Burks that White’s complaint alleged injury including physical, mental and emotional pain and suffering.
“Therefore, by its plain reading, the underlying complaint alleges bodily iinjury which is covered by the policy,” Daniels wrote.
White opposed Scottsdale’s motion too, and adopted Burks’s response as his own.
Scottsdale’s policy withstood the test.
Gilbert wrote that White’s complaint alleged no facts supporting a reasonable inference that he suffered actual physical harm from his termination.
“It is true that Illinois courts have found ‘bodily injury’ defined only as ‘injury, sickness or disease sustained by a person’ could include any injury including nonphysical harm,” Gilbert wrote.
He wrote that where a policy defines bodily injury as “bodily injury, sickness or disease,” as Scottsdale’s policy did, it is limited to actual physical harm.
“The court is hard pressed to see how the pain and suffering one might suffer simply from being wrongfully terminated could constitute bodily injury, sickness or disease sustained by a person,” he wrote.