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When Every Risk Is a Work Risk: The Erosion of Neutral Risk in Illinois Workers’ Compensation
A hundred years ago, “risk” seemed easier to spot. In one of the earliest cases that discuss the concept of risk in Illinois, Eugene Dietzen Co. v. Industrial Board, 279 Ill. 11, 116 N.E. 684 (1917), the Court discussed a case from England involving a lion tamer employee whose job duties included looking after baggage and cleaning lion cages. Hapelman v. Poole (1908). Feeding the lions, however, was not part of the employee’s assigned job duties. On the date of accident, the employee was left in charge of the lion cages. One of the hungry lions escaped into the dressing room, where the employee followed to try to corral the feline back to its cage. In doing so, the lion attacked the employee, killing him.
Can you imagine the look on the Arbitrator’s face in Illinois in 2026 if a defense attorney tried to argue that a lion tamer’s accident didn’t arise out of his employment because he wasn’t specifically tasked with feeding the lions or leading the lions back into their cages? Although the employer didn’t prevail in Hapelman, the defense attorney made the argument, and the argument was considered a legitimate one in considering how risk is defined in our State.
In McAllister v. Illinois Workers’ Compensation Commission (2020 IL 124848), the Supreme Court re-defined risk, in favor of the employee. The McAllister Court determined that Caterpillar Tractor Co. v. Industrial Comm’n, 129 Ill. 2d 52 (1989) “prescribes the proper test” for analyzing whether an injury arises out of the employment when common bodily movements or everyday activities are involved. The Court specifically concluded that a certain lineage of cases were overruled to the extent that injuries attributable to common bodily movements were not compensable without a neutral risk analysis. In other words, injuries caused by common bodily movements – such as reaching, bending, squatting and standing up, could be defined as risks of the employment.
Simply walking across the employer’s floor was never considered to be “unique” to the employment. Illinois Consolidated Telephone Co. v. Industrial Comm’n., 314 Ill. App. 3d 347 (2000). Denying compensation for the simple task of walking aligns with Illinois’ rejection of the positional risk doctrine, a doctrine which holds that the circumstances of employment do not need to increase the risk of injury in order for compensation to be awarded. One Appellate Court case post-McAllister was reassuring in that regard, but the decision was unpublished and cannot be cited for any precedential value. In Buckley v. Illinois Workers’ Compensation Commission, 2022 IL App (2d) 210055WC-U, the claimant was walking down a normal carpeted hallway to speak with Deputy Chief when his knee popped and he fell. The Court upheld the Commission’s application of the neutral risk analysis and concluded that walking down a hallway while performing a work-related purpose was not, standing alone, enough to establish an employment risk. In Buckley, there were plenty of histories of injury within the medical records that would have given the Court some justification for finding in favor of petitioner. But the Appellate Court did a deep and well-reasoned dive into the specific task performed by the petitioner at the time of the accident and correctly denied benefits.
Buckley seems to have been an unpublished outlier, as our State trudges along towards positional risk. In Tazewell County v. Illinois Workers’ Compensation Commission, 2025 IL App (4th) 230754WC, the Court awarded benefits in a repetitive trauma claim involving a petitioner who simply felt pain while working. The crux of the Appellate Court’s decision was as follows, “We believe that, when a preexisting condition is asymptomatic and then becomes painful as the result of work-related activity, that symptomatic condition is compensable under the Act as an aggravation of the preexisting condition even in the absence of an organic or structural change in the preexisting condition.”
Laurel Saflarski v. Palatine Community School District 15, 2026 Ill. Wrk. Comp. LEXIS 153 (IWCC May 18, 2026) is a concerning recent decision, and a departure from the well-established cases that preceded it. In Saflarski, petitioner was a 64-year-old special education program assistant who fell in the school hallway. The mechanism of injury? Walking at a brisk pace, towards the location of her assigned job duties. According to the Commission’s decision, petitioner’s rubber-soled shoe caught on a heavily waxed floor. However, there was no testimony whatsoever from petitioner that the wax caused her to fall, and petitioner agreed at trial that the floor did not contribute to her fall. The Dissent pointed out that the video capturing the moment of the fall occurred over four still frames and was consistent with petitioner’s own testimony that she tripped over her own feet while waving to colleagues. Since petitioner was not performing any tasks that were incidental to her employment at the time of her fall, the risk to which petitioner was exposed was a neutral risk. As the Dissent correctly concluded, petitioner was not exposed to any greater risk than a parent or student traversing the same hallway.
It is getting tougher to reconcile Illinois’ rejection of the positional risk with decisions that find compensability for (1) injuries resulting from common bodily movements; (2) walking while not engaged in any work-related activity; and (3) pain on the job. The Illinois Workers’ Compensation system was designed to compensate injuries arising out of and in the course of the employment, rather than serve as general accident insurance for everything that can happen to an employee at work. Taking all the recent decisions together, it is difficult to think of many scenarios where accidents do not arise out of the employment, serving to weaken the distinction between employment risks and everyday risks. The consequences of these decisions fall squarely on the Illinois employer, and the costs of doing business in Illinois tick upward again.