Murphy v. Employment Security Department

For 17 years, Leo Murphy (plaintiff) worked as a brick mason for Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Corporation (Kaiser). Murphy’s job involved maintaining furnaces and occasionally running a jackhammer. In 1985, Kaiser informed Murphy that his services as a brick mason were no longer needed. Murphy was offered a position in the pot room with a 5 percent pay cut. It was likely that Murphy would have spent more than half his time working as a carbon setter, an unskilled role that involved standing on a narrow catwalk and using a heavy crowbar to break the crust in vats of molten metal six to 12 inches below that ranged from 1,000 to 1,300 degrees. Murphy, who was 50 years old, described the extremely strenuous work in the pot room as a young man’s job and said he would not work there because of the extreme heat and gases. Few workers in the pot room were as old as Murphy. Most carbon setters transferred to less physically demanding jobs when they got some seniority. Kaiser argued that Murphy had no physical restrictions noted in his personnel file and could adapt to the work. After declining the reassignment, Murphy was awarded unemployment-compensation benefits, and Kaiser appealed. The commissioner of the Employment Security Department (department) (defendant) set aside the determination, finding that Murphy had not demonstrated good cause for leaving his employment. The department argued that a reasonably prudent person in Murphy’s position would not quit simply because the work was strenuous and usually performed by younger workers and that Murphy should at least have tried the carbon-setter job. The superior court affirmed, and Murphy appealed.