Employees' Act Has no Time or Space Limitations

Employers’ Liabilities under respondeat superior liability is not limited to the time and space limits of the job and appears even to extend to potentially criminal acts. In Minnis v. Oregon Mutual Ins. Co., 162 Or App 198 (1999), a supervisor from Little John's Pizza who had allegedly been subjecting another employee to a sexually hostile work environment telephoned the employee at her home at 3:45 a.m. and invited her to come over to help him grieve for the death of his brother. The employee went to the supervisor's house and allegedly was subject to unwelcome advances. The employee alleged that Little John's was vicariously liable for the supervisor's conduct in his own home even when interacting with a coworker outside of work hours. The court, in determining that an insurance company had a duty to defend Little John's, concluded that even though there was no temporal and spatial link between the acts taken on behalf of the employer and the act that resulted in the alleged harm, that a jury could nonetheless find that the work relationship was a necessary precursor to the later intentional tort and that the tort was a direct outgrowth of the work relationship.