The Commonwealth Court held that a workers’ compensation judge must promptly hold the statutory hearing on a compromise-and-release agreement and cannot refuse because other petitions remain disputed.
The Commonwealth Court held that a satellite installer was J&S’s employee, Dish Network was his statutory employer, and an insurance certificate did not establish coverage.
The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania, sitting en banc, affirmed a workers’ compensation award in a 4-3 decision, holding that a pharmacy tech struck by a vehicle while crossing the street during a mandatory 15-minute break was in the course of employment—because the break’s brevity diminished the autonomy it conferred and left her time only for an act of ministration. The majority recast Pennsylvania’s personal comfort doctrine as a continuum of factors rather than a binary formal/informal distinction, a reading three dissenters characterized as abandoning over a century of settled precedent.
The Commonwealth Court affirmed denial of workers’ compensation benefits to a pro se claimant, holding that substantial evidence supported the WCJ’s credibility determinations and that rejecting a claimant’s medical evidence is not capricious disregard — and rejecting the employer’s motion to quash under the post-2014 version of Pa.R.A.P. 1513.