A worker violated a known safety rule at their place of employment and was injured. They were denied benefits because of their actions.

Andre Jones worked for Crothall Laundry and on October 14, 2017 entered a fenced area where laundry was processed so that he could move some mops. A piece of moving machinery pinned his leg against a conveyor belt and he suffered a serious leg injury. He sought benefits which his employer denied, saying he had failed to follow a safety rule.

He acknowledged that he knew employees were supposed to enter the area through an interlock gate in the fence which was designed to deactivate the machinery in the area. This was a rule enforced by his employer, and managers who testified said that if employees entered the fenced area without using the gate to de-energize the equipment they would be terminated. He bypassed the gate and went through a separate entry point in the fence and did not deactivate the equipment.

The Workers’ Compensation Commission denied his benefits, which he appealed. Then the Court of Appeals of Virginia upheld that denial, finding his act of entering the machinery area without using the gate was the proximate cause of his injury and that his employer had enforced the safety rule. The rule was reasonable, known to the employee and there for the employee’s benefit. The employee intentionally broke the rule and that breach proximately caused the injury. All those things must be proven for an employer to use a defense of a willful breach of a safety rule and the courts concluded that they did.

Read the full case here.