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Employers increasingly held liable for crashes involving employees’ use of cellphones while driving: U.S. report


May 22, 2012   by Canadian Underwriter


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U.S. corporations are increasingly being held liable for crashes involving employees using their cellphones while driving, signalling the need for companies to ban cellphone use while behind the wheel, a recent National Safety Council (NSC) study says.

Appendix B of the report, Employer Liability and the Case for Comprehensive Cell Phone Policies, lists 18 examples of judgments entered against employers since 1999 for collisions in which their employees were driving while using their cellphones. Fourteen of the examples include settlement and damage amounts, with the average value being $6.9 million.

The largest award in these cases went against a commercial transportation company in Missouri, where a federal judge awarded $18 million, a district court awarded $6 million, and a jury awarded $700,000 in three cases involving a collision that killed three people and injured 15 others.

“The driver of the tractor-trailer was checking his phone for text messages when his truck ran into 10 vehicles that had stopped in backed-up traffic on a freeway,” states the NSC report. “The driver had reached for his phone and flipped it open, missed seeing the stopped traffic and hit the vehicles without braking first.”

Crash-related lawsuits involving employers have included a mix of business and personal scenarios, the report adds:

  • driving during work hours and outside of typical work hours;
  • driving to or from work appointments and driving for personal reasons;
  • employer-provided and employee-owned vehicles;
  • employer-provided and employee-owned phones;
  • hands-free and handheld devices; and
  • business and personal conversations.

“Employers can never be 100% protected in the event of a lawsuit. However, if employers can show that they implemented a total ban policy, educated employees, monitored compliance and enforced the policy, they will be in a more defensible position than if they had not followed these practices,” the NSC report says. “The best practice is to prohibit all employees from using any cellphone device while driving in any vehicle during work hours or for work-related purposes,” it adds.

“Regarding off-the-job hours, precedent has been set by lawsuits. Thus, employers may want to extend their policies to cover off-the-job use of company-provided wireless devices, use of personally owned devices that are reimbursed by the company, and use of devices in company-provided vehicles. All work-related cellphone use while driving should be banned 24-7.”


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