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Reifsnyder v. Workers' Compensation Appeal Board9/28/2005
ts argue, subsection 309(d.2) provides the most accurate basis for calculating AWW.
Although the specific issue presented in this case is one of first impression, this Court does not write upon an entirely blank slate. Three decisions from this Court --Triangle Building Center, supra, Hannaberry, supra, and Colpetzer, supra -- are particularly helpful to our consideration. Triangle Building Center involved a concurrent employment situation governed by the last clause of Section 309(e) of the Act, which provides that where an employee is working under concurrent contracts with multiple employers, his wages from all employers "shall be considered as earned from the employer liable for compensation." 77 P.S. 582(e). The claimant in Triangle Building Center had been laid off by one employer for approximately two months at the time he was injured in the other employer's employ. The question for this Court was whether the temporary layoff from the concurrent employment "precluded assessment of [the claimant's] concurrent earnings experience within the average weekly wage calculation." 746 A.2d at 1109. This Court answered that question in the negative.
In so holding, we noted that " he Act seeks to compensate claimants for the ongoing loss in earning capacity resulting from their injuries; therefore, some reasonable assessment must be made of claimants' pre-injury ability to generate further earnings." The Court explained that the mechanics of the legislative scheme revealed an intention that the "baseline figure from which benefits are calculated should reasonably reflect the economic reality of a claimant's recent pre-injury earning experience, with some benefit of the doubt to be afforded to the claimant in the assessment." 746 A.2d at 1112. This Court then concluded that the General Assembly directed inclusion of concurrent wages in the benefits computation "to create a reasonable picture of a claimant's pre-injury earning experience for use as a projection of potential future wages and, correspondingly, earnings loss." Id. at 1113.
In Hannaberry, 834 A.2d 524, this Court similarly emphasized that Section 309 "was obviously intended to ensure an accurate calculation of wages in the myriad employment scenarios arising in today's workplaces." Colpetzer, 870 A.2d at 884 (characterizing Hannaberry); Hannaberry, 834 A.2d at 532-33 (structure and language of Section 309 make apparent that "a 'fair ascertainment' of the employee's wages is the legislative intendment"). In Hannaberry, the question was whether a seriously and permanently injured full-time teenage worker, whose full-time employment was immediately preceded by part-time after-school employment, should have those periods of part-time employment included in the calculation of his AWW. After recognizing that Section 309 did not specifically address this precise work scenario, this Court reasoned that inclusion of the quarters in which the claimant had worked part-time after school would result in an underestimation of his actual wages and earning capacity. Accordingly, we held that the claimant's AWW was to be calculated using only the quarter in which he had worked full-time. We noted, inter alia, that this construction of the statute furthered the overall legislative purpose of Section 309 to provide for an accurate measurement of the AWW and also avoided an absurd and unreasonable result. 834 A.2d at 533-34.
This Court's most recent decision, Colpetzer, involved claimants whose work injuries occurred within a year of previous work injuries for which they had received workers' compensation benefits. The issue was how properly to calculate the AWW in instances where there were relevant weeks in the look-back period in w
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