At the end of last year, the Commonwealth Court decided the matter of Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board v. Workers’ Compensation Appeal Board (Kochanowicz), No. 760 C.D. 2010, which it received on remand from the state Supreme Court after its prior decision in the case was vacated. The court was directed to reconsider the matter in light of the prior Supreme Court decision in Payes v. WCAB (Commonwealth of Pennsylvania State Police), 79 A.3d 543 (Pa. 2013), decided just over a year ago. The Supreme Court in Payes had taken the lower appellate tribunals to task for the manner in which they had been dealing with work-related psychological injuries—often substituting their own findings for those of the trial court. The case restored the appropriate power to the fact-finder in “mental-mental” psychiatric work injury claims, or those stemming from nonphysical stimuli.
Until Payes was decided, the appellate courts had found very few cases that they deemed to involve abnormal working conditions, irrespective of what the workers’ compensation judge (WCJ) had found. Moreover, according to the Supreme Court, the Commonwealth Court had been essentially ending the “abnormal working conditions” analysis when a claimant was employed in a highly stressful occupation, with routinely elevated levels of stressful psychiatric stimuli that were ostensibly “normal” to the job. The problem with that sort of analysis is that it almost always invalidated any factual findings made at the trial level. The Payes court refocused the need of the appellate courts to remain true to the “well-supported” factual findings of the workers’ compensation judge, who acts as both trier of law and fact in a workers’ compensation proceeding.
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