Inspection of Employment Records Law "Employee" Former Employees Access to Personnel Records
Thomas Jefferson Univ. Hosp., Inc. v. Pa. Dep't of Labor and Indus., PICS Case No. 17-1056 (Pa. June 20, 2017) Wecht, J. (17 pages).
Commonwealth Court erred in finding that a terminated employee had a right to review her personnel files under the Personnel Files Act because former employees, who were not laid off with re-employment rights and who were not on a leave of absence, were not "employees" and had no right to access their personnel files. Reversed.
Fired nurse filed a request with employer to review her personnel file pursuant to the Personnel Files Act one week after she was terminated. Employer denied the request and nurse filed a complaint with the department. The parties filed a joint stipulation of facts and agreed to forgo an evidentiary hearing. Nurse conceded that she was not employed by employer at the time she made her request and stipulated that she did not have re-employment rights and was not on a leave of absence. The department heard argument on the issue of whether nurse was an "employee" under the act. The department relied on Beitman v Dep't of Labor & Indus., 675 A.2d 1300, and found that nurse requested her file within a reasonable time after her termination and granted her request. Employer appealed.
On appeal, the Commonwealth Court defined "current" to mean "presently elapsing," "occurring in or existing at the present time" or "most recent" and found that nurse's employment, having terminated one week prior to her request, clearly qualified as "presently elapsed" and fell within the statute. The court opined that the act had to include recently terminated employees because under 1322, an employee was expressly permitted to inspect a personnel file for the "basis for his [or]her employment termination." Employer appealed.
The Supreme Court granted allocator on the issue of whether the definition of "current employee" in the act meant former employee. Employer argued that the language of 1321 unambiguously defined "employee" to include only currently employed individuals or those laid off with re-employment rights or on a leave of absence. The department argued that the act was ambiguous because, although 1321 seemed to exclude former employees from coverage, 1322 allowed an employee to inspect his or her personnel filed "to determine his or her own qualifications for termination." The department contended that it would be impossible for an employee to inspect files related to his or her termination prior to being terminated.
The court considered the definition of "currently employed" and found the Commonwealth Court's reasoning that "current" included "most recent" or "presently elapsed" was strained. While "current" could mean "most recent" in certain contexts, it did not follow that "current" always included the sense of recentness. "Current" was commonly understood to mean "right now" or "at the present time" and by that definition, "current employees" were not former employees. The court also found that when 1321 was read in conjunction with 1322, it was sufficiently unambiguous in context. Employees did sometimes receive advance notice that they would be terminated and the language did not require that an inspecting employee be terminated. The language guaranteed inspection access for current employees to files that an employer used to determine whether an employee qualified for termination. Reading the act to exclude terminated employees did not violate the rules of statutory construction and to the extent that Beitman contained language inconsistent with that, it was overruled.