Injured on employee premises overnight: What are the factors affecting coverage?

What if an injury happens on employer premises overnight, when no one is "working?" In many cases, employers will have a person stay overnight on the job site, either for security reasons, remote location, convenience, or just in case. Or no real reason at all.

What if you have an event causing an injury, say, a fire? Did it happen when he was "on duty?" or not? I think this is an easy case if it happened at night (i.e. guy is paid minimal amount and given housing with the job duty of just being on the premises at night and not even "on patrol" or anything). If the employer is willing to say, "we paid him and his job was just to stay there overnight and be a presence on the site in the event of any attempted burglary of the premises or any emergency situations that might arise. He didn't have to patrol just be there and be available in the event of some situation that might require a person on site." What the testimony is will be critical.

I don't think continuous coverage applies if the injury occurs during the day when the injured party had no responsibilities for the employer. I think this is a situation where some of the old case law draws lines that are just arbitrary and not so much reasoned out as "we don't want to open the door to pandora's box of coverage situations." In a case I had recently (on call IT worker at home S/F going out to get stuff from his vehicle partly for work and partly for personal use) such a case was cited. No reasoning, just "here's where we draw the line." It can be hard to tell if that's prudence or just refusal to draw the lines at all.

 

I think the way to win those cases is to pull the attention away from "here's the legal rule/extension of a legal rule requiring coverage as a matter of law" and towards "under the facts of this case, the employer is explicit that his presence there was part of his job duties and furthered their business affairs in x/y/z ways."