He was cleared to return. A press brake role was open. Nobody told him
A Wisconsin employer told an injured welder he was being laid off because work had slowed down. His position had already been filled.
The Wisconsin Court of Appeals on October 6 affirmed that Bartelt Custom Automotive unreasonably refused to rehire the worker after a compensable workplace injury, breaching Wis. Stat. section 102.35(3).
The worker injured his left hand on the job in January 2017 at the Milwaukee metal fabrication shop. He was cleared to return without restrictions by late February.
When he showed up ready to work, the company's president said things had gone quiet. They hadn't - Bartelt had hired another welder about a week before. A press brake operator role was open too. Nobody mentioned it.
That mattered. The president had originally recruited the worker for the press brake role after seeing it on his resume. He turned it down - he preferred welding - but told Bartelt he was capable of running the machine. He testified he would have taken any job for financial reasons.
Instead, he was shown the door. He found work elsewhere at lower pay, left after a week when the role was not temporary-to-permanent as advertised, then landed another press brake gig at even less.
The core legal question: what does an injured worker need to prove before the burden shifts to the employer?
Bartelt pushed for a stricter test requiring the worker to show he applied for rehire and was turned away because of the injury. The Labor and Industry Review Commission (LIRC) applied a simpler standard: employed, injured on the job, denied rehire.
The appeals court agreed. Wisconsin's published decisions had been split on this for decades. The court resolved the conflict using the "first-in-time" rule - when appellate decisions clash, the earliest governs. That 1983 decision required only three elements.
The reasoning was practical. Information about why someone wasn't brought back sits with the employer. Requiring workers to prove motive upfront would, as an earlier court put it, place "an unreasonable roadblock in the employee's path to recovery."
Bartelt's defenses - that the role was unsuitable, that offering it would have been futile, and that the worker should have asked - all failed on the evidence.
For HR teams managing return-to-work after a comp claim, the message is operational: when an injured worker is medically cleared, the employer must identify and offer suitable roles. Waiting for the worker to ask is not enough.
