She breaks back in job interview, then loses fight in court
By the age of 54, Arnprior’s Sharon Lee Armstrong had done some tough jobs: She had worked in a chicken-processing plant, managed a cleaning company, owned a sewing business and delivered liquor.
So when she came close to exhausting her employment insurance benefits in March 2009 — after losing her job as an Extreme Pita restaurant manager — she was willing to try almost anything.
“I liked to work, and I had a lot of experience in a lot of things,” says Armstrong, now 63.
She responded to a job posting for a customer service representative at Gallagher’s Garage Inc., a car repair shop and U-Haul agent in Kanata. The posting said the job included money handling, clerical duties and reception work — all things Armstrong knew she could manage — and she went for an interview.
At that initial meeting on March 27, 2009, Armstrong was told that the job also required some lifting: the ability to hitch trailers to customers’ vehicles. That was not a problem, she assured her interviewers, since although she might seem small — she was fivefoot-four and weighed about 120 pounds — she was made of muscle.
She rolled up a sleeve and flexed a bicep to emphasize her point. What’s more, Armstrong said, she knew how to lift, having previously handled heavy buckets of chicken pieces.
Armstrong was one of three candidates invited for a second interview. It included a test to see if the applicants could hitch a trailer.
Company president Brian Gallagher would later tell a civil court trial that, during the test, Armstrong successfully directed his truck to a position beside a 6-by-12 foot trailer. Armstrong straddled the trailer tongue to lift it onto the hitch, but Gallagher suggested it would be easier to stand beside the trailer and use the attached chains.
Armstrong took that advice, but when she lifted the trailer — she knew to keep her back straight and lift with her knees and arms — she heard a “pop.” She collapsed to her knees.
“He (Gallagher) asked me if I wanted an ambulance, and I said, ‘No, I think I just pulled a muscle really bad in my back,’ ” Armstrong remembers. “I told him, ‘I can’t do this job.’ ”
She drove home to Arnprior, but the pain kept building. A neighbour took her to the Arnprior Hospital, where she was diagnosed with a burst fracture of the L4 vertebra in her lumbar spine.
A burst fracture is considered a severe spinal injury since it means the vertebra has been crushed; it’s an injury commonly seen in car accidents.
Surgeons at The Ottawa Hospital fused Armstrong’s lumbar spine, and she spent the next three months in hospital and rehab.
She subsequently launched a lawsuit for compensation, saying the garage and its president unreasonably exposed her to the risk of injury during the interview process by asking her to lift the trailer.
Lawyers for the garage, however, said it was simply an unfortunate accident — and a function of Armstrong ’s untreated osteoporosis.
Armstrong had been prescribed medication for osteoporosis in July 2007, her family doctor testified, but she did not continue taking the drug because of its expense.
In a recent ruling, Justice Graeme Mew decided the garage did not bear legal liability for the accident either as a property owner or as Armstrong ’s prospective employer.
“What happened on March 31, 2009, was an accident. A very unfortunate one. But an accident nonetheless,” the judge concluded.
The risk to which Armstrong was exposed was not unreasonable, the judge said, since she professed to being experienced at heavy lifting. What’s more, Mew said, Gallagher and his now 68-year-old wife had lifted trailer hitches for decades without incident.
“I would add that Ms. Armstrong knew and understood going into her interviews that the job she was competing for involved lifting trailers,” Mew said. “She knew it involved heavy lifting. She was game to try even though she had been told she had ‘thin bones.’
“Although she did not express it in such terms, Ms. Armstrong was willing to assume the risk that anyone implicitly accepts when they bend and lift an object.”
Armstrong, now 63, was surprised and disappointed by the ruling, which ended her long fight for compensation. “It was the last thing we expected,” she says.
Armstrong walks with a cane and is unable to work. After the accident, she also found out that she was ineligible for workers’ compensation because she wasn’t employed by the garage or in training.
She now lives on disability benefits provided through the Canada Pension Plan.
Several years after the incident, U-Haul made available to its agents a portable jack to hitch and unlatch trailers so that its employees didn’t have to lift them. Gallagher’s Garage has bought one of the jacks.