Masri v. Wis. Labor and Indus. Review (Summary)

EMPLOYMENT CLAIM/WRONGFUL TERMINATION

Masri v. Wis. Labor and Indus. Review, No. 2012AP1047 (Wis. Ct. App. Apr. 2, 2013)

An appellate court affirmed an agency’s determination that a psychologist intern was not an employee protected by the state’s health care worker protection statute, and so was not entitled to a court review of her complaint.

The intern was a doctoral candidate at a university completing an unpaid internship with the university’s medical college.  During this time, she worked 40 hours a week at the hospital and was provided with office space, support staff, free parking, full access to facilities and patient records, and professional networking opportunities.

During this time, the intern reported alleged medical ethics violations to a medical college official.  Thereafter, her internship was terminated.  She then filed a complaint with a state agency, alleging that the state’s health care worker protection statute protected her from retaliation by the medical college for reporting her medical ethics concerns.  The agency ruled that the intern was not an employee, and so did not come under the protections of the statute.

The court noted that while the relevant section of the statute uses the term “person[s]” to refer to protected individuals, other parts of the statute that interact with the relevant section expressly apply only to employees.  The section defining the types of disciplinary actions prohibited by the relevant section defines such actions as “any action taken with respect to an employee….”  For this reason, along with other, similar references to “employees” rather than “persons” in the statute, the court found that the legislature intended the statute to protect only employees from retaliatory behavior for filing a protected report.

The court concluded that the agency’s conclusion that the intern was not an employee was reasonable.  It found that many courts have determined that some sort of compensation is essential to an employee/employer relationship.  Because the intern did not have a salary and her parking, office space, and the like were provided to enable her to perform her assigned duties, she was not compensated for her work.  In addition, the promise of health insurance that was not given and a willingness to pay a salary at some future time, contingent on the receipt of grant funding, were insufficient to render the intern an employee of the medical college.