The California Supreme Court unanimously agreed a prison guard can’t collect a 50% multiplier on disability payments, as the court determined those disbursals are distinct from conventional workers’ compensation.
Justice Leondra Kruger wrote the 7-0 opinion, ending Michael Ayala’s attempt to increase the payments he collected for being the victim of a planned attack by inmates held by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
According to court records, Ayala filed a compensation claim against the CDCR alleging the agency didn’t appropriately respond to a credible safety threat. An administrative law judge rejected that argument, but the state’s Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board agreed with Ayala’s allegations and applied a clause in the state’s workers’ compensation law allowing a 50% increase to the “amount of compensation otherwise recoverable” when an injury is traced to serious and willful misconduct.
The CDCR challenged that ruling. However, the agency didn’t dispute the misconduct finding, but rather argued the 50% clause of the Labor Code doesn’t apply to industrial disability leave payments available to public employees under the Government Code. When the California Fourth District Appellate Court agreed with the CDCR, Ayala appealed to the Supreme Court with the WCAB filing a brief supportive of his position.
Kruger’s opinion clarified that temporary disability benefits under the Labor Code are capped at two thirds of a worker’s average weekly earnings, whereas the Government Code’s regular and enhanced industrial disability benefits — available only to certain public workers — gave Ayala his full salary while on leave.
As a legal matter, the court held, the industrial leave payments are not compensation as the workers’ compensation law defines the term, “they are, instead, benefits created and conferred under the Government Code.” Kruger said that reading of the law squares with the court’s own precedent reaching at least as far back as 1998, with multiple opinions taking note that industrial disability leave isn’t written into the Labor Code, so payments under that program fall outside the scope of that definition of compensation.
Although Ayala agreed with that framing, he nonetheless raised several arguments for treating those benefits as compensation, but the court rejected each supposition. Kruger said the main position, “which echoes the Board’s primary line of reasoning in this case,” focused on language in the 1974 law that created industrial disability leave via reference to California Labor Code.
But Kruger said “the argument places substantially more weight on the definition … than it can bear” and contradicted Ayala’s apparent assumption that lawmakers intended industrial disability leave to specifically mean temporary disability benefits.
“The specification that ‘industrial disability leave’ includes any ‘period’ of vocational rehabilitation suggests a focus on when the industrial disability leave provisions apply — i.e., during any ‘period’ of temporary disability, as that term has been elaborated in the workers’ compensation context — as opposed to what benefits are conferred,” Kruger wrote.
She also quoted the appellate opinion, which held: “As a logical matter, incorporating a definition from one statutory scheme into a second one does not alone expand the scope of the first statutory scheme … although our Legislature has the power to amend both the Government Code and the Labor Code, the fact that part of the Government Code incorporates the Labor Code’s definition of ‘temporary disability’ does not, by itself, mean that the definition of ‘compensation’ under the Labor Code has expanded in any way.”
Ayala also invoked other Labor Code provisions, but Kruger said the cited clauses undercut his point by using terms other than “compensation” to describe benefits awarded outside workers’ compensation law. The court also noted the workers’ compensation law allows payments “without regard to negligence,” and that the 50% increase only applies through a finding of employer misconduct.
Applying the ruling to other situations, Kruger noted, might help an employee by avoiding a 50% reduction in industrial disability leave payments if the worker were found to have caused their own injury through serious misconduct. Finally, the court said the WCAB gave no explanation of how its position could square with a straightforward reading of state law.
Carla Anene, Jasmine Dovlatyan, Mark Beatty, Mary Huckabaa, Gina Hogtanian and Tariq Ashrati represented the CDCR.
In response to questions from The Record, the agency issued a statement that read: “The department appreciates the court’s ruling.”
Ellen Sims Langille submitted a support brief for the department on behalf of the California Workers’ Compensation Institute.
Ferrone Law Group represented Ayala.
The Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board is represented by Anne Schmitz and Allison Fairchild. According to an emailed statement, the WCAB is “reviewing the court’s decision, and if necessary, will announce any developments at a later date.”