Livingstone v. Abraham & Straus, Inc

In Livingstone v. Abraham & Straus, Inc., 111 N.J. 89, 543 A.2d 45 (1988), petitioner's employer was a tenant in a retail shopping mall. Its employees, pursuant to the rental agreement with the mall, were permitted to park in the mall's parking lot. There was nothing in that agreement which designated an exclusive area of the lot for its employees, but Abraham & Straus requested its employees to park only at the outermost edge of the lot, so as to leave more convenient parking for customers. Petitioner was injured one morning after parking her car and while walking through the lot to her employer's entrance. In concluding the injury was compensable under the Workers' Compensation Act and not precluded by the "going and coming" rule discarded by the 1979 amendment to the Act, the Supreme Court first found nothing in the legislative history of the amendment to reveal a legislative intent to overrule prior parking lot decisions. Id. at 102, 543 A.2d 45. Those decisions had, generally, held that "parking lots owned, maintained or provided by employers were to be considered as part of the employer's premises, and that injuries occurring in such lots before or after the actual work day arose out of and in the course of employment." Id. at 99-100, 543 A.2d 45. Observing post 1979 amendment precedent which construed the 1979 amendment as primarily attempting to eliminate compensability for "off-premises, lunch-break-type accidents" and for "special hazards . . . on route to the employer's premises," the Court concluded "we are persuaded that the Legislature impliedly approved of the principle established by the prior parking lot cases, namely, that lots owned, maintained, or used by employers for employee parking are part of the employer's premises, and had no intent to affect the validity of such decisions." 111 N.J. at 102, 543 A.2d 45. "The omission of any provision purporting to overrule or limit the reach of the parking-lot cases, in light of the comprehensive nature of the amendment, indicates that the Legislature considered these cases to be consistent with the economic tradeoffs struck by the Act, and therefore in need of no correction." 111 N.J. at 102-03, 543 A.2d 45.