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Trucker trainee due workers comp benefits for burnt feet

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Trucker trainee due workers comp benefits for burnt feet

A three-judge panel of the Arkansas Court of Appeals affirmed an earlier decision of the Arkansas Workers’ Compensation Commission to award workers compensation benefits to a truck driver in training whose feet landed in a crockpot full of hot water. 

Van Buren, Arkansas-based USA Trucks Inc. and its third-party administrator Broadspire Services Inc. rejected a claim filed by trainee James Jarrell in 2015 after he suffered an injury in 2014 just after waking up in the double-bunk berthing compartment of a truck, stepping down off the top bunk and landing with his feet in a steaming crockpot that had been put there by the trainer, according to the Wednesday’s ruling in Little Rock, Arkansas. 

In November 2015, Administrative Law Judge David Greenbaum of the Arkansas Workers’ Compensation Commission — following an October commission hearing in Marion, Crittenden County, Arkansas — ruled that Mr. Jarrell proved that he sustained an injury arising out of and during the course of his employment and found USA Trucks liable

The trucking company appealed the decision, arguing that truck drivers are not on duty until they are dressed and ready to go to work. Mr. Jarrell, however, was instructed that he had to sleep in the truck so that he and the trainer, then parked in West Memphis, Arkansas, could get an early start in the morning for a training drive to Texas, court documents state. 

Mr. Greenbaum had previously found that Mr. Jarrell “had been instructed to sleep in the truck so that the two men could leave early the next morning and that by sleeping there he had advanced his employer's interest.”