A warehouse picker in North Las Vegas hurts his shoulder lifting a pallet. He reports it, sees the company clinic, and opens a claim. The adjuster denies it. He appeals, a hearings officer sides with him, and benefits start. Six weeks later his supervisor calls him in and ends the job over an attendance issue nobody mentioned before. Losing work after a workers comp claim in Nevada happens more often than most people expect, and Nevada law has an answer for it.
That answer did not come from the Legislature. It came from the Nevada Supreme Court, which recognized a narrow exception to at will employment more than forty years ago. Knowing how the court framed that exception tells you what a real case needs.
At Will Employment and Its Limits
Nevada follows the at will rule. An employer may end employment for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason at all. That rule has exceptions, though, and each one rests on a public policy the courts consider strong enough to override the default.
Retaliation for pursuing industrial insurance benefits is one of those exceptions. The reasoning is practical. A benefit system stops working when workers fear losing their jobs for using it.
The Case That Created the Claim
Hansen v. Harrah’s, 100 Nev. 60, 675 P.2d 394 (1984), decided two consolidated appeals. Hansen repaired pinball and video machines. After a work injury he filed a claim, and the claims administrator rejected it. On appeal a hearings officer decided he was entitled to full benefits. His employer then ended his job. Lewis, an assistant bar manager, followed almost the same path with a hernia injury and a different employer.
Both district courts dismissed the complaints. One reasoned that Nevada had not adopted a retaliatory discharge exception and that creating one belonged to the Legislature. The Supreme Court disagreed and reversed both dismissals.
The opinion states the holding plainly. The court adopted a narrow exception to the at will employment rule, recognising that retaliatory discharge by an employer stemming from the filing of a workers compensation claim by an injured employee is actionable in tort. The court also said the tort carries its own remedy, so no administrative exhaustion inside the industrial insurance system is required first. You can browse the court’s published work through the Nevada Supreme Court decisions page.
Punitive damages after Hansen
The court addressed punitive damages in the same opinion. It held that punitive damages fit this tort where an employee shows malicious, oppressive or fraudulent conduct by the employer. The court declined to allow them against those two employers, reasoning that punishing conduct nobody knew was actionable would be unfair. It left the door open for later cases. Nevada’s general punitive damages statute today is NRS 42.005, which requires clear and convincing evidence of oppression, fraud or malice.
Why the Comp Statute Alone Does Not Help
Injured workers often assume the industrial insurance chapters must contain a retaliation section. They do not. NRS 616A.020 runs the other way, making the rights and remedies in those chapters exclusive of other rights and remedies for an injury by accident arising out of and in the course of employment.
That exclusivity covers the injury. It does not cover a decision to end someone’s job for using the system. The firing is separate conduct with separate harm, which is exactly why the court treated it as a tort rather than a benefits dispute.
What a Claim Has to Prove
Three pieces carry the case. First, protected conduct, meaning the pursuit of industrial insurance benefits. Second, an adverse action, usually termination. Third, causation between the two.
Causation does the heavy lifting. In Allum v. Valley Bank of Nevada, 114 Nev. 1313, 970 P.2d 1062 (1998), the court addressed the standard in retaliatory discharge cases and required the plaintiff to show that the protected conduct was the proximate cause of the discharge. So a claim built only on timing rarely survives. Timing opens the door, and the rest of the record has to walk through it.
Adverse action is not only a termination
Employers rarely fire a worker the week benefits start. The pressure usually arrives in smaller pieces. Hours drop. A shift moves to a schedule that collides with physical therapy. A supervisor reassigns the good routes. A performance plan appears for the first time in nine years. Each step deserves its own dated note, because a pattern reads very differently from a single event. A resignation under that pressure raises a harder question, since you then have to show that staying had become unreasonable. Talk to a lawyer before quitting rather than after.
Evidence That Moves These Cases
- The claim file, including denial letters, hearing decisions and the date benefits started.
- The complete personnel file, requested in writing rather than described from memory.
- Performance reviews from before the injury, which often contradict the stated reason.
- Attendance and schedule records showing how the employer treated comparable absences.
- Texts, emails and messaging threads where a supervisor mentions the claim or the restrictions.
- Names of coworkers who kept their jobs after similar conduct with no open claim.
- Any written light duty offer, and the medical restrictions it was supposed to match.
Pull those documents early. Personnel files move when managers leave, and messaging systems purge on their own schedules.
Build the timeline before memory fades
Write one page with dates in order. The injury date, the report date, the clinic visits, the denial, the appeal, the hearing, the first benefit payment, and every meeting with a supervisor after that. Add who attended each meeting. Add what changed in your schedule afterward. A timeline like that turns a scattered story into a pattern a decision maker can follow. It also exposes the gap between what a manager said in March and what the file claims in June.
Who the Rule Reaches
The exception protects employees, and that word does real work. A worker classified as an independent contractor may face an argument that no employment relationship existed at all. Temporary and staffing placements raise a second question, because two companies may share control over the same shift. Probationary status does not remove the protection, and neither does a short tenure.
Union members carry an extra layer. A collective bargaining agreement may create grievance rights that run beside the tort claim rather than replacing it. Public employees face their own procedures. So the first task in any workers comp claim in Nevada that ends with a firing is naming the correct employer and the correct process.
What Employers Say Instead
No employer writes down the real reason. Expect a business explanation that sounds neutral on paper. Performance decline, attendance, a restructuring, a position eliminated, or no available work within the restrictions.
Each of those explanations can be tested. Compare the timing to the claim milestones. Compare the treatment of other workers. Look at whether the role got filled two months later under a different title. Our article on employer retaliation in wrongful termination cases covers that comparison in more depth.
The light duty trap
Modified duty creates a common pattern. A worker returns with restrictions, and the employer assigns tasks that quietly exceed them. The worker either reinjures the shoulder or refuses the task. Then the file records insubordination rather than retaliation. Document every assignment against the written restrictions on the day it happens. Our piece on modified duty discrimination and termination follows that sequence closely.
Other Claims That Can Run Alongside
Some firings involve more than retaliation. NRS 613.330 makes it an unlawful employment practice for an employer to discharge a person, or otherwise discriminate, because of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability or national origin. Nothing in that list mentions a workers compensation claim. A lasting work injury can still amount to a disability, and then the discrimination path may open beside the tort claim.
Those statutory claims run through administrative agencies with short filing windows of their own. So the calendar matters from the first week. Missing an agency deadline can close a route that the tort claim cannot replace.
The Injury Underneath the Firing
Do not let the termination bury the injury case. Benefits handle medical care and a portion of lost wages, and they leave a great deal uncovered. When someone other than the employer caused the harm, a separate claim may exist against that party. A defective machine, a negligent driver, a property owner or an outside contractor all show up in these files.
Severe injuries deserve that second look. Our catastrophic injury page explains how those damages get built when a negligence claim sits beside a benefits claim. Two claims moving together also change the leverage in both.
Deadlines and First Steps
Different clocks run at the same time here. The industrial claim has its own appeal deadlines through hearings and appeals officers. The discrimination path has agency deadlines. The tort claim has a civil limitation period under NRS 11.190, and the correct subsection depends on how the claim gets framed. Nobody should guess at that from a website.
Practical steps in the meantime stay simple. Keep working the medical claim and attend every appointment. Request your personnel file in writing. Save messages to a personal device rather than a company phone. Write a dated timeline while the details stay fresh. Avoid signing a severance release before someone reads it, because those documents routinely waive the exact claim this article describes.
When the Firing Followed the Claim
A job loss on top of an injury hits a household twice in the same month. Nevada law recognises the pattern, and the courts built a remedy for it long ago. The Bourassa Law Group can review the timing, the personnel file and the medical restrictions, then tell you whether the record supports a retaliation claim. Send us the dates through our contact page and we will look at it with you at no cost.
This article describes Nevada law in general terms and creates no attorney client relationship. Your own timeline and documents decide whether a tortious discharge claim exists, so put them in front of a Nevada lawyer before the deadlines run.
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