Petersen v. Alkema
| Decision Date | 26 September 1953 |
| Docket Number | No. 7868,7868 |
| Citation | 123 Utah 604,261 P.2d 175 |
| Parties | PETERSEN, v. ALKEMA et ux. |
| Court | Utah Supreme Court |
Ray S. McCarty, Salt Lake City, for appellant.
Samuel C. Powell, Derrah B. Van Dyke, Ogden, for respondents.
Appeal from a judgment entered pursuant to an order granting defendants' motion for summary judgment against plaintiff and in favor of defendant. The material facts deduced are uncontradicted.
Defendants owned and operated a fruit farm near Ogden, Utah. During the harvest season transient workers were often hired by defendants to pick fruit. Such workers were usually recruited from an Ogden employment office early every morning and were returned to town after completion of the day's work. The growers furnished picking buckets and standard eight-foot, three-legged picking ladders from which the pickers operated. On the 24th of July, 1951, defendants hired five men, one of whom was plaintiff, to pick apricots. The workers were told to 'pick out a row of trees and a ladder and go to work.' Plaintiff selected a particular row of trees, took the ladder standing in the row, and began picking. Plaintiff stated that before beginning work he set the ladder up and shook it to make sure it was tight, would not tip over, and was not 'rickety.' Some time later, after plaintiff had picked thirty-two bushels of apricots and while picking his last bushel for the day, the ladder collapsed and plaintiff was injured in the fall.
Plaintiff sues claiming that defendants were negligent in not supplying safe tools with which their employees worked and in failing to administer proper first aid after the accident. There being no material controversy over these facts, the question becomes whether, as a matter of law, the plaintiff could not recover under these circumstances, with the most favorable inferences of fact, so as to justify the summary judgment.
In the case of Proctor v. Town Club, Inc., 105 Utah 72, 141 P.2d 156, we held that a ladder is a simple tool within the meaning of the simple tool doctrine, which is in accordance with the majority view among the states. 1 It was under this holding, undoubtedly, that the lower court granted defendant's motion for a summary judgment. However, the mere fact that a ladder is classified as a simple tool does not exonerate the employer from liability under the simple tool doctrine.
Russell v. Borden's Condensed Milk Co., 53 Utah 457, 463, 174 P. 633, 635.
Under the simple tool doctrine as recognized in this jurisdiction, the employer retains the duty to supply safe appliances for use in his regular business. Guitron v. Oregon S. L. R. Co., 62 Utah 76, 217 P. 971; Reynolds v. American Foundry and Machine Co., Utah 1952, 239 P.2d 209. The effect of the simple tool doctrine is not to render the master not guilty of a breach of duty, but rather to impose upon the servant a duty of inspection, reasonable under the circumstances, breach of which duty will provide the master with a defense to an action for negligence.
The employee under the ordinary simple tool case, is in a better position than the employer to judge of defects in the tools which he fully understands and which he uses frequently in the course of his employment; he is chargeable equally to the employer with knowledge of all obvious or readily discoverable defects. Proctor v. Town Club, Inc., supra. The simple tool doctrine operates not because the employee assumes the risk of injury from defects in such tools, but because the employer has the right to rely upon the employee to inform him of any obvious defects, or to not use the tool if it is unsafe. His nonliability, then, rests upon the assumption that the employee is in as good, if not better, position to observe the defect as the employer.
The plaintiff in the present case was a day laborer, paid by the bushel; thus, it might be considered unreasonable to require him to make the same inspection required where an employee uses the same simple appliance day after day, with an opportunity to observe any deterioration or developing weakness in the ladder. Further, the ladder in this case was five or six years old at least, and we have no evidence upon the length of life to be expected from a ladder of this type nor whether the age of the instrument was sufficient to put the employer on notice of deterioration, a fact of which plaintiff, of course, had no knowledge. Unlike the Proctor case, supra, the ladder in this case, was an important tool in defendant's business, and we held in Reynolds v. American Foundry & Machine Co., supra, that in such a case, a supplier of work tools is held to a higher standard of care than one who furnished the chattels gratuitously and not for his business purposes. 2 Under these circumstances, it would appear questionable as to whether the simple tool doctrine would apply at all.
We have no evidence as to the nature of the defect, an important factor inplacing responsibility for the breakage of the ladder. Was it the type of defect that the employee was under a duty to...
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