High court dismisses suit filed over alleged workplace harassment that led to suicide

The wife of a deceased railroad worker who connected her husband’s suicide to workplace harassment can’t sue Union Pacific Railroad Co. under federal law regarding railroad workers injured or killed at work because his alleged injuries were only psychological, the divided Supreme Court of Iowa ruled Friday.

The railroad worker named in Docket No. 23-1154 had worked as a welder since 1988 in so-called “red zones,” which sometimes put a worker “in a life-threatening situation.” At one point he took a position as a welder helper because “he did not want to have the additional responsibilities that came with being a welder,” according to the court.

In the events prior to his 2018 suicide, a supervisor had been pressuring him to take on the position as welder, and had been harassing him and his crew, giving them more assignments and on one occasion, a dangerous assignment he was not comfortable with, according to the record. That year, the supervisor transferred his team to work 3.5 hours away — a new assignment his widow testified did not make sense to her husband, and contributed to his mental demise. A doctor that year diagnosed him with anxiety and insomnia and prescribed medication. A psychiatric expert later provided an opinion to a “reasonable degree of medical certainty that (the man’s) suicide was a direct result of the stress and harassment he underwent for months at work.”

The widow sued the railroad company under the Federal Employers’ Liability Act, which covers “injury or death resulting in whole or in part from the negligence of any of the officers, agents, or employees of such carrier,” the ruling states.

“Despite this broad language, the United States Supreme Court has concluded that FELA generally incorporates common law limits as to compensable injuries” and “(a)ccordingly, and consistent with the common law of negligence as it exists in a number of jurisdictions, the Supreme Court has allowed railroad employees to recover for physical and emotional injuries, but only when there is physical impact or ‘negligent conduct of their employers that threatens them imminently with physical impact,’” Iowa’s highest court wrote.

In affirming a summary judgment issued by a district court, the court wrote that the “injuries suffered by the worker because of his supervisor’s harassment were emotional injuries not tied to a physical impact or harm or a near impact or harm.”

Two justices dissented, arguing the case should proceed to a jury trial, writing that case law and that which limits FELA claims on mental injuries and suicide “is a relic from a time when suicide was not well understood, when societal attitudes on the subject were quite different… Modern cases apply more general causation standards focusing on foreseeability to claims involving liability for the suicide of another.”