Home Depot accused of failing to provide safe workplace

Texas trial court orders employer to produce safety-related materials in worker injury case

BY Bernise Carolino 21 Aug 2023

In a recent case, the Texas Court of Appeals disagreed with the trial court’s order compelling Home Depot U.S.A., Inc. to produce over 100 safety-related items that it used for training an employee who suffered injury.

The plaintiff, a Home Depot employee, initiated a personal injury case. The lawsuit claimed that he injured his back while loading a zero-turn lawn mower onto a customer’s trailer while he was working in November 2020.

Home Depot was allegedly negligent when it failed to provide a safe workplace; failed to offer safe and appropriate instrumentalities, equipment, and machinery; failed to hire competent and careful coworkers; failed to adequately staff its stores; and failed to refrain from instructing or requiring employees to use unreasonably dangerous methods to perform their work.

Home Depot also allegedly failed to sufficiently supervise employees and failed to adequately train workers, especially for unusually precarious tasks or those involving a greater risk of injury than their typical duties.

The plaintiff sent a notice requiring Home Depot to designate a corporate representative who was authorized and prepared to testify on the following topics:

Home Depot’s Safety Takes EveryONE program
loading merchandise except the lawn mower into customers’ vehicles
loading heavy merchandise except the mower into vehicles
safety training except that associated with loading the mower into vehicles
safety rules for employees except those associated with loading the mower into vehicles
the sales of zero-turn mowers and other riding mowers and the process of loading them into vehicles
equipment for loading zero-turn and other riding mowers into vehicles, its availability, and the feasibility of adopting it and making it available to workers
the process for employees to report workplace injuries and the manner of storing records of those injuries
the policies and procedures for retaining videos of workers’ injuries
the number of employees working at the store where the injury occurred and at the time when it occurred and the manner of deciding how many workers should be present at the stores on any given day

The trial court ordered Home Depot to produce safety-related materials such as policy manuals, safety manuals, presentation slides, training materials, tests, test results, and videos that Home Depot allegedly showed, taught, or provided to the plaintiff during his employment.

Court rules in employer’s favor

Home Depot filed a petition challenging the trial court’s order. It argued that the trial court required it to produce items clearly irrelevant to facts of consequence in the case because the safety training materials included information that was not relevant to the plaintiff’s injury and that consisted of 28 training courses that he took after the date of his injury.

In the case of In Re Home Depot U.S.A., Inc., the Court of Appeals Ninth District of Texas at Beaumont conditionally granted the petition of Home Depot.

The trial court should not have ordered Home Depot to comply with the plaintiff’s notice and should not have compelled it to produce documents and materials that were unrelated to facts of consequence to the plaintiff’s claims in this case involving an injury allegedly caused by loading a mower into a vehicle, the appellate court said.

The trial court was trying to make Home Depot produce over 100 items that it used during the plaintiff’s training. These items, which involved subjects ranging from defibrillators to workplace violence, were potentially safety-related in general but were unlikely to contain information relevant to facts of consequence in this case, the appellate court decided.