LUZON STEVEDORING CORPORATION, PETITIONER, VS. WORKMEN’S COMPENSATION COMMISSION AND ROSARIO VDA. DE ROSANO, RESPONDENTS.

Petition filed by the Luzon Stevedoring
Corporation for review of the decision of the Workmen’s Compensation
Commissioner (in RO4 WC Case No. 3941), ordering it to pay claimants Rosario Vda. de Rosano,
minors Rebecca, Edgardo and Baltazar,
all surnamed Rosano, death compensation benefits,
burial expenses and attorney’s fees for the death of Pastor Rosano;
as well as of the resolution of the Workmen’s Compensation Commission en
banc denying
petitioner’s motion for reconsideration of the aforesaid decision.

As found by the Acting Referee of the
Department of Labor, supported by the evidence on record, the facts of the case
are as follows:

At about 6 o’clock in the morning of 30 November 1964, stevedore Pastor Rosano went
to Pier 9, Manila, to await the arrival of a barge of herein petitioner corporation, scheduled to dock at 9 o’clock in the morning. 
While thus waiting for the vessel, Rosano had a
heated verbal argument with one Benjamin Valdez, another stevedore engaged by petitioner corporation, over the possession of a platform used
in the loading and unloading of cargoes taken into or out of the
watercraft.  Rosano
was able to get it.  As the barge did not
arrive as scheduled, Rosano went home for lunch.  When he returned at about 1 o’clock in the afternoon, he found the platform again
in the possession of Valdez.  Rosano’s demand for
delivery to him of said platform precipitated another argument which almost
ended in fist fight.  Valdez finally gave up
the platform, but not before he had uttered threats against the life of Rosano.  Later,
informed that the barge they were waiting for definitely was not arriving, Rosano, with two companions, boarded a passenger jeep bound
for Tondo. 
When he got off from the jeep near his house, he was met by Valdez,1 who whipped out a knife and stabbed him.  Rosano fell to the
ground.  He was immediately brought to
the hospital, where he expired at 2:30 in the afternoon
of that same day, 30 November 1964 (Exhibit C).

On 1 March 1965,
the widow, Rosario Vda. de Rosano, for herself and on
behalf of her 3 minor children, filed with the Department of Labor a formal
claim for death compensation benefits against petitioner Luzon Stevedoring
Corporation for the death of her husband, Pastor Rosano.  The company answered, denying the allegations of the complaint
and raising the defense of prescription, in that the claim was filed beyond the
3-month period from the death of Rosano, as provided
in the Workmen’s Compensation law.

On
15 September 1965, after due hearing, the Acting Referee rendered judgment, ordering
the company to pay to the claimants death compensation benefits in the sum of
P6,000.00; P200.00 as reimbursement for burial ex­penses; P200.00, as
attorney’s fees; and P61.00 as fees payable to the office.  The award was based on the finding that Rosano was an employee of the company and that death arose
out of his said employment.  The defense
of prescription was rejected, it appearing that the company had failed to
controvert the claimants’ right to compensation within the period prescribed in
Section 45 of Act 3428.  The company
appealed to the Workmen’s Compensation Commission, which affirmed the decision
of the Referee.  And when its motion for
reconsideration of said decision was denied by the Commission en banc,
the company filed the present petition for review, assigning as alleged errors
committed by the Commission its finding on the existence of employee-employer
relationship between the petitioner and the deceased and the ruling that the
right to demand compensation benefits has not prescribed.

The
contention that there existed no employer-employee relationship between
petitioner and the late Pastor Rosa no is premised on
the allegation that the latter was a “gang boss” working with the
petitioner on an “on and off” basis; that Rosano
worked for petitioner when so assigned by the union, of which he was a member
that, if at all, the employer-employee relationship existed only whenever the deceased rendered actual service for the petitioner.  Since on 30 November 1964 Rosano was not able to work (because the
barge did not arrive), then, according to petitioner, he was not an employee
when he (Rosano) met his death.

There is no merit to this
contention.  In the first place, while pe­titioner
company failed to submit any evidence that the work rendered by the deceased
was purely casual,^[1] it has
been established that prior to the stabbing incident the deceased, with other
stevedores, was in the pier prepared to do hauling jobs for the petitioner,
which work, it can not be denied, is connected with petitioner’s business.  And there is un­rebutted
testimony that the deceased had been doing stevedoring work for said
petitioner for 15 years.^[2] Secondly, even
assuming petitioner’s allegations to be true, that the deceased was a union
member, and that it was the union that furnished laborers and stevedores when
required by peti­tioner company, presumably with the latter delivering the
stevedoring charges directly to the union for distribution to the individual
laborers, these facts did not make the union an independent contractor whose
intervention relieved the said company of liability for the death of a laborer,
specially where no contractor’s bond was required for the union’s performance
of its undertaking.^[3] The union here was ho
more than an agent of the company and whose function is merely to save the latter from the
necessity of dealing with individual laborers. 
And in this kind of indirect employment, it has been repeatedly held,
the employer is not relieved of liability under the Workmen’s Compen­sation
law.^[4]

It is next claimed for
the petitioner that even if he were an employee, Rosano’s
death is not compensable because it came when he was outside of the
company premises and not at work.

We do not agree with the
appellant.  From the proved sequence of
events that took place on 30 November 1964 involving the deceased Pastor Rosano, it is evident that the cause of his fatal stabbing by Benjamin Valdez
(who was thereafter accused and convicted) can be traced to their disagreement
over the possession of a platform that was to be used in their work for
petitioner; that although the altercation started in the morning the same was
resumed when they returned in the afternoon and carried on when Valdez left,
lay in wait near Rosano’s house, and there met and stabbed
the latter when he alighted from the jeep. 
Neither can it be said that the employer is exempt from liability under
the Workmen’s Compensation law because the cause of death arose outside of the
company premises,^[5] whereas the
quarrel happened at the waterfront, at Pier 9.

For an injury to be
compensable, it is not necessary that the cause therefor
shall take place within the place of employment.  If a workman is acting within the scope of
his employment, his protection “in the course of” the employment
usually continues, regardless of the place of injury.^[6] Thus, in one case,^[7] an
employee went to the house of the employer across the warehouse where he worked
to get a drink of water; that there, while trying to drive away a puppy that he
saw eating fish in the employer’s kitchen, he was bitten in the hand, as a
result of which he later died of hydrophobia. 
The death of the employee was held compensable, on the ground that his
trip to the kitchen was occasioned by the employer’s fault in not providing adequate
drinking water at the warehouse.  In the
present case, it cannot be disputed that it is inherent in the stevedoring work
for the petitioner that the laborers, like the deceased, stay in the pier and
wait for the docking of petitioner’s vessels.

Furthermore,
jurisprudence is to the effect that injuries sustained by an employee while in
the course of his employment, as the result of an assault upon his person by
another employee, or by a third person, no question of the injured employee’s
own culpability being involved, is compensable where from the evidence
presented, a rational mind is able to trace the injury to a cause set in motion
by the nature of the employment, or some condition, obligation or incident
therein, and not by some other agency.^[8]

“The rule as stated by the Connecticut Supreme Court is that x
x x when the employee is
assaulted while he is defending his employer, or his employer’s interests, or
when the assault was incidental to some duty of his employment, the injuries he
suffers in consequence of the assault will, as a rule, arise out of the
employment.  He will then be serving his
employer’s ends and not of his own. (Jacquemin vs.
Turner and Seymour Manufacturing Co., Conn., 103 A. 115; Goldhirsch
vs. American Character Doll Co., 135 Misc. 817, 238 N. Y. 519)

Similarly,
in Appleford vs. Kimmel, 296 NW. 861, it appearing
that a theater employee’s job required him to handle
disturbances in the theater; that several patrons were ordered by him to leave
the theater because of disturbances they were causing; and that after the
theater closed the em­ployee started for home and was subjected to injurious
assault by those he had previously ordered to leave; the court held that the
evidence sustained the finding that the employee’s injury arose out of, and in
the course of, the employment.

In
the leading case of Field vs. Charmette Knitted
Fabric Co., 245 N.Y. 138, where a superintendent was injured on the sidewalk by
workmen with whom he had quarreled in the mill, the late Justice Cardozo (then of the New York Supreme Court) declared the
injury compensable, reasoning that the quarrel outside of the mill was merely a
continuation or extension of the quarrel begun within; that continuity of the
case had been so combined with continuity in time and space ” that the
quarrel from origin to ending must be taken to be one”.

The
rationale applies to the case at bar, where the facts, shown by the evidence
found by the referee and affirmed by the Commission, are that Rosano had been assaulted by the man with whom he had
quarreled barely a half hour after leaving the place of work where the quarrel
occurred, in connection with the possession of the platform to be used in
unloading cargo, without any independent agency or cause for the assault being
shown.  As pointed out by Larson (Workmen’s
Compensation Law, Vol. I, section 29.21) –

“since the
ultimate test applied by judge Cardozo was whether
‘the quarrel from origin to ending must be taken to be one’ it should make no
difference how widely separated the assault was from the em­ployment in time
and space if it remained an in­herent part of an employment incident.”

Other cases applying the
same principle are collated in Schneider, Workmen’s Compensation”, Perm. Ed., Vol. 6, page 131, et seq.

As
regard the defense of prescription raised by petitioner, it is true that the
formal demand for compensation for the death of Pastor Rosano
on 30 November 1964 was made by the
dependent widow and minor children only on 1 March 1965, or beyond the 3-month period provided for
in section 24 of the Workmen’s
Compensation Act.  But we are not
impressed by petitioner’s disclaimer that it had no knowledge of the stabbing
incident prior to its noti­fication by the Regional Office of the filing of the
claim.  It may be pointed out that the
law does not speak of “formal notice” by the employer of the
accident; it specifies only “knowledge of the accident”.  For petitioner to say that it had no actual
knowledge of the stabbing incident on 30 November 1964 would run counter to the
ordinary course of human behavior.  An
employer could scarcely have been spared the news of the killing of one of its
laborers by another laborer, especially where the cause therefor
started in the place where the laborers gather and work.  When the widow went to the company premises
to demand compensation for the death of her husband a week after his burial,
she was able to talk to an unknown employee inside the compound, who told her
that she could not get anything because the death of her husband did not occur
in the company premises.  Far from
showing lack of knowledge by the employer, this fact constitutes sufficient
indication that the death of Rosano was already a
matter of common knowledge in petitioner’s office that even an allegedly
unidentified employee could advance the exact defense that the employer later
set up in the case.

The
fact remains that petitioner failed to controvert in due time the right of the
claimants to compensation, as required by section 45 of Act 3428.  And the rule is now well-settled that the requirements (for claimants)
of giving of notice of injury and filing of claim within the prescribed period
is non-jurisdictional and does not constitute a bar to compensation proceedings
if the employer, who had knowledge of the accident, failed to controvert the
claimant’s right to compensation pursuant to section 45 of the law.^[9] For such failure of the employer to
controvert the claim constitutes a waiver (or a forfeiture by law) of its right
to question the validity and reasonableness of the claim and precludes the
setting up of all non-jurisdictional defenses, such as non-compensability of
injuries, pres­cription, and the like.^[10]

WHEREFORE, finding no error in the appealed decision
of the Workmen’s Compensation Commission and its resolution en banc,
the petition for review is hereby dismissed, with costs against the petitioner.

Dizon, Makalintal,
Zaldivar, Sanchez, Fernando, Teehankee,
and Barredo, JJ., concur.

Capistrano, J., did not take part.

Concepcion, C.J., voted in favor of this opinion before going on
official leave.

Castro, J., on leave.

^[1]
Casual means occasional, coming without regularity.  The work is purely casual when it is not a
part of the business in which the employer is engaged (Mansal
vs. P.P. Gocheco Lumber Co., 96 Phil. 941,
945).

^[2]
T.S.N., page 7, hearing of 6 April 1965.

^[3]
Madrigal Shipping Co., Inc. vs. WCC,
L-17495, 29 June 1962.

^[4]
Flores vs. Compañia
Maritima, 57 Phil. 905; Asia Steel vs. WCC, L-7636, 27 June 1955; Mensal vs. P. P. Gocheco
Lumber Co., 96 Phil. 941; U. S. Lines vs.
Associated Watchmen & Security Union, L-12208-11, 11 May 1958; Madrigal
Shipping Co., Inc. vs. WCC, supra.

^[5]
Petitioner has its office at Tacoma Street.,
Port Area.

^[6]
Younger vs. Motor Cab Co., 260 N.Y. 396, cited in Horovitz
on Workmen’s Compensation, page 172.

^[7]
Chua Yeng vs. Roma, L-14827, 31 October 1960.

^[8]
Morgan vs. Hoage, 63 App. D.C.
355, 72 F. (2d) 727.

^[9]
Surigao Consolidated Mining Co., Inc. vs. WCC, L-26077, 27 May 1968, 23 SCRA
820; Pampanga Sugar Mills vs. De Espeleta, L-24073, 30 Jan. 1968,
22 SCRA 325; San Miguel Brewery vs. Vda. de Joves,
L-24258, 26 June 1968, 23
SCRA 1093; Talisay Silay
Milling Co. vs. WCC, L-22096, 29 Sept. 1967, 21 SCRA 366; and
others.

^[10]
Magalona vs.
WCC, L-21849, 11 Dec. 1967, 21 SCRA 1199;
also MRR vs. WCC, L-21504, 15 Sept.
1967, 21 SCRA 98; MRR vs. Binoso, L-18264, 26 May 1964; NDC vs. WCC, L-21724, 27 April 1967, 19 SCRA 861; Republic vs. WCC, L-22650, 28 April 1967, 19 SCRA 1022.