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Washington: The US Postal Service (USPS) may be liable for the death of Billy Couch, truck driver who died two years after of forklift injuries, the 7th Circuit ruled.

The court has refused to label the man as a “borrowed employee.”

A USPS employee ran over Couch’s foot with a forklift in 2008 Elk Grove, Ill., a facility of the postal service. Couch was died allegedly of those injuries, OpposingViews.com reported.

Alyce Couch, the victim’s widow, sued the government under the Federal Tort Claims Act.

A federal judge in Chicago granted the US government summary judgment after agreeing with the USPS that workers’ compensation was the only remedy available to Crouch as a “borrowed” employee

However, the 7th Circuit reversed Wednesday.

“In this case, both parties agree that the Postal Service was not a borrowing employer under the common law test because it did not exercise control over the manner of Couch’s or his fellow B&B Trucking drivers’ work,” Judge David Hamilton wrote for a three-member panel.

B&B “employees are not ‘doing the work of other employers’ – they are doing the work of B&B Trucking,” Hamilton wrote.

“In common parlance, to ‘furnish’ means to ‘provide or supply.’ B&B Trucking is not providing or supplying its drivers to any other employer. It hires drivers and other employees to fulfill its service contract with the Postal Service to transport mail.

“This reasoning should be familiar to the Postal Service. Drivers transporting mail under [USPS] contracts and other similar contracts cause accidents from time to time. When victims of such accidents sue the Postal Service under the FTCA, the Postal Service uses this same reasoning to show that these drivers are not its own employees but independent contractors for whom it bears no legal responsibility.

“As the government would have it, though, [contract] drivers are independent contractors when they injure other people but borrowed employees when Postal Service employees injure them, at least in Illinois,” he added. “This ‘heads-I-win, tails-you-lose’ approach is both unfair and doctrinally incoherent. If the drivers are independent contractors, they cannot be borrowed employees – at least not at common law – because they are not under the Postal Service’s control.”

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