Statues of repose: laws that come back to haunt.

Kristin Loiacono

When golfer Payne Stewart and his traveling companions plunged to their deaths while aboard a Learjet, the crash re-ignited the debate about the soundness of statutes of repose. Just 24 days before the Stewart jet went down, a law went into effect in Florida exempting commercial planes that are more than 20 years old from products liability claims.

Stewart's Learjet was 23 years old and had been leased from a commercial company, designating the aircraft a commercial plane. Opponents of the Florida bill now had a high-profile example of how the legislation protects manufacturers but not Florida families. The Palm Beach Post editorialized that the law was "designed to ... reward campaign contributors." (Florida Law Hampers Search for Crash Cause, Palm Beach Post, Oct. 27, 1999, at 10A.)

The crash reminded us that Florida families are not the only ones who face limits on their ability to seek justice in court. The General Aviation Revitalization Act of 1994 is a federal law designed to protect from legal accountability on a national level manufacturers of aircraft that seat fewer than 20 passengers (like Learjets) and are not, at the time of the accident, engaged in scheduled passenger-carrying operations.

Federal statute of repose 

The General Aviation Manufacturers Association started pushing for broad liability protection in 1986 with a bill that was dozens of pages long. Over the next several years, the group saw its proposal whittled down to the General Aviation Revitalization Act, which passed in 1994.

The act not only protects manufacturers of general aviation aircraft older than 18 years but also shields the makers of aircraft component parts, including replacement parts, that are more than 18 years old. This federal law--in addition to the Florida law--covers the Stewart crash and may leave six grieving families with no remedy, even if it turns out that the manufacturer's negligence caused the crash.

The General Aviation Revitalization Act of 1994 is a consumer-unfriendly law. It gives the general aviation industry special protection at the expense of consumers. Now some members of Congress stand ready to similarly protect the manufacturers of machine tools.

Ohio Republican Steve Chabot, along with Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) and John Shimkus (R-Ill.), introduced H.R. 2005, the Workplace Goods Job Growth and Competitiveness Act, on June 7, 1999. The title of the bill masks its true intentions.

H.R. 2005 does nothing for workplace job growth and competition. Instead, it creates a protective shield around manufacturers and sellers of machine tools and other durable goods used by workers. The bill calls for an 18-year statute of repose for workplace products, eliminating causes of action for property damage caused by defective workplace products and for personal injury to employees covered by workers' compensation.

Under this bill, workplace injuries are not treated equally. If a plant manager, a company client, and two workers are injured by a 20-year-old piece of defective machinery that explodes, only the manager and the client can recover against the machinery's manufacturer. The two workers and their families cannot hold the manufacturer of that product accountable. Instead, the workers are allowed to seek recovery only through their workers' compensation programs.

These programs, which vary from state to state, are not designed to fully protect workers from product injury losses. Instead, they typically provide workers with only two-thirds of the state's minimum average prevailing wage for a limited time. Modest adjustments in compensation are made only for the most serious injuries. Meanwhile, workers' compensation laws exclude management, allowing business owners and floor supervisors to recover for their injuries from the manufacturer of the defective product.

Labor weighs in with criticism

The inequities the bill foists on workers did not go unnoticed by organized labor groups, such as the AFL-CIO, UAW, and the Teamsters Union.

A letter from the AFL-CIO written in opposition to H.R. 2005 explains that a worker's recovery for injury is "drastically limited ... because state workers' compensation laws ... do not provide for compensation for noneconomic damages, such as loss of fertility, loss of a limb, permanent disfigurement, and other forms of pain and suffering."

The Teamsters Union notified Congress last October that "this bill shifts the burden of defective products from the manufacturers who designed, built, and profited from them to the unsuspecting worker who is injured by them." The UAW called the bill "a thinly veiled effort to discriminate against workers injured or killed on the job."

The bill may well raise an equal protection question. Consider the example of the plant manager and worker who are injured in the same accident, yet are treated differently under H.R. 2005.

In addition to discrimination issues, the bill raises federalism concerns. Historically, the states, not the federal government, have primacy over products liability law. Passage of H.R. 2005 would alter the balance between federal and state law and squelch lawsuits that state laws would have permitted.

The House Judiciary Committee, by a vote of 16 to 14, ordered H.R. 2005 to be reported to the full House last September. For some time it appeared likely that the full House would consider the bill before adjourning the first session. While that did not happen, the bill remains a live issue this year.

Kristin Loiacono is media relations coordinator for ATLA.