On Nov. 16, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in the matter of Peters v. Workers' Compensation Appeals Board (Cintas), addressed for the first time the traveling employee doctrine, thus establishing the criteria under the act for workers in the mobile workforce who are injured on the job. This rule, which is an important touchstone in the litany of "course and scope" issues addressed last month in this space, holds that when a "traveling employee" (one without a fixed place of employment such as a mobile phlebotomist) is injured after commencing with the business of the employer, it is presumed that the worker is furthering the employer's business at the time of an injury unless the employer is able to rebut that presumption by demonstrating that the employee's actions prior to the injury were so foreign to and removed from the worker's usual employment that they constituted an abandonment of that employment. While the rule has been consistently applied by the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court, in January 2020, the Supreme Court granted the claimant's petition for allowance of appeal in a traveling employee case, framing the issues as follows:

• What constitutes an abandonment of employment such that a traveling employee is not entitled to benefits under the Pennsylvania Workers' Compensation Act?
• Is an injury compensable under the Pennsylvania Workers' Compensation Act when an employee is injured while returning home after attending a work-sponsored social event.

Recalling the facts from the en banc decision in Peters v. Workers' Compensation Appeals Board (Cintas), 214 A.3d 738 (Pa. Commw. 2019), the claimant was a traveling salesman for his employer Cintas, and was injured in a motor vehicle accident after attending a social event organized and paid for by the employer at a local pub. The event, which took place at the end of the claimant's workday, was among the type that was regularly held by Cintas during "sales blitzes." On the date he was injured, the claimant finished his workday and then drove to the social event, famously passing the exit for his home, as the pub was beyond that exit. The motor vehicle accident took place after the event was over, while the claimant was driving home. The workers' compensation judge (WCJ) denied the claim petition and the board affirmed, both reasoning that the claimant failed to prove that he was in the course and scope of employment at the time of the accident because the social event was voluntary.

The majority of the en banc Commonwealth Court, for its part, analyzed the matter and correctly identified the claimant as a "traveling employee," (a fact that was a bit ambiguous, below). However, the court also noted that in all the cases where a traveling employee was compensated for a work-related car accident that took place after a nonwork-related stop following a work shift, the employee was still on the way home from the shift and therefore, still within the course and scope of employment. In those cases, according to the court, the intervening detour did not change that fact. The court distinguished that scenario from Peters, where the accident took place while the claimant was returning from a social event, before which the claimant had to pass his home to attend.