Am I a Jones Act Seaman? How Courts Decide Whether You Qualify

A practical look at the two-part Chandris test, the Fifth Circuit’s Sanchez refinement, and why your job classification can mean the difference between a full tort recovery and a workers’ compensation schedule.

By Michael Null, Attorney  Morrow & Sheppard LLP

Why “Seaman” Status Matters: Three Very Different Legal Worlds

A worker injured on or around a vessel in U.S. waters falls into one of three legal regimes, and the gap between them is enormous.

The Jones Act, 46 U.S.C. § 30104, gives qualifying seamen a personal-injury cause of action against their employer for negligence, including the negligence of any officer, agent, or fellow crew member. A Jones Act plaintiff can recover the full range of tort damages: past and future medical expenses, lost wages and earning capacity, pain and suffering, mental anguish, and physical impairment.

The Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act (LHWCA), 33 U.S.C. § 901 et seq., covers most maritime workers who are not seamen — for example, longshoremen loading and unloading vessels, shipbuilders and ship repairers, and harbor workers. The LHWCA is a no-fault scheme. Benefits are scheduled and capped, and there is no recovery for pain and suffering.

State workers’ compensation is more limited still and applies to land-based workers who fall outside the federal maritime regimes.

A worker who is misclassified, pushed into LHWCA or state comp when he or she should be a Jones Act seaman, can lose six- and seven-figure recoveries to which they are legally entitled. That is why the seaman question is the first one a competent maritime attorney asks.

MORROW & SHEPPARD REAL CASE EXAMPLE :
As a real world example from a case our firm is handling, an offshore drilling company recently attempted to classify an injured electrical worker as not a seaman because the vessel that he was injured on was in port for months prior to the accident.  However, we successfully argued that the injured worker should still be considered a seaman because he worked on other vessels that were on the water for the company and never worked on any vessel that was in port. 

The Two-Part Test: Chandris, Inc. v. Latsis

The controlling Supreme Court framework comes from Chandris, Inc. v. Latsis, 515 U.S. 347 (1995). To qualify as a seaman under the Jones Act, an injured worker must satisfy two requirements:

1. The worker’s duties must contribute to the function of the vessel or to the accomplishment of its mission.
2. The worker must have a connection to a vessel in navigation (or to an identifiable group of such vessels) that is substantial in both its duration and its nature.

The Supreme Court has been explicit that the inquiry is status-based, meaning courts look at the nature of the worker’s employment, not just where the worker happened to be standing the moment of the injury. A welder who normally works on land does not become a seaman by stepping onto a vessel for an afternoon, and a longtime crew member does not lose seaman status by stepping ashore for a day.

Prong One: Contributing to the Vessel’s Function or Mission

The first prong sounds technical, but the Supreme Court has interpreted it broadly. In McDermott International, Inc. v. Wilander, 498 U.S. 337 (1991), the Court rejected the older rule that a seaman must “aid in navigation.” Wilander was a paint foreman who supervised sandblasting and painting on offshore platforms from a paint boat. The Court held that he qualified as a seaman because his work contributed to the function of the vessel, even though he was not steering, plotting courses, or handling lines.

After Wilander, the universe of qualifying job duties is wide. Drillers, roustabouts, derrickmen, mechanics, cooks, medics, riggers, divers, welders, deckhands, captains, and engineers can all satisfy this prong, depending on how their work relates to the vessel.

Prong Two: A Substantial Connection in Duration and Nature

The second prong is where most close cases are won or lost. It has two distinct components.

Duration: The 30 Percent Rule of Thumb

Chandris established what has come to be called the 30 percent rule — the Supreme Court’s guideline that a worker who spends less than approximately 30 percent of his or her time in the service of a vessel in navigation should not qualify as a Jones Act seaman. 515 U.S. at 371.

This is a guideline, not a hard line. A worker hovering near 30 percent will see the question fought out on the specifics of his or her work history. Courts look at the entire course of the worker’s employment with that employer, not just the day of the injury or the month before it.

MORROW & SHEPPARD REAL CASE EXAMPLE :
In one close-call case, our client’s vessel-time numbers were not obvious from a single payroll record or job title.  The defense argued that our client could not meet the substantial-duration requirement because some of the records described his work by project, invoice, or customer rather than by vessel assignment.  

We approached this issue by rebuilding our client’s work history from the ground up.  We gathered invoices showing the number of days billed for particular vessels, including a 31-day, 10-day, 9.5-day, and 3.5-day entries tied to offshore vessels and liftboats.  We then compared those invoices to the vessels the offshore company owned, managed, or operated during the relevant time frame.  

From there, we used corporate representative testimony to connect the paper records to the real-world work. That evidence helped turn a borderline duration case into a fact-based showing that the client’s connection to vessels was substantial. Thus, our client was able to obtain seaman status for purposes of his personal injury case. 

Nature: The Fifth Circuit’s Sanchez Factors

The “nature” component asks whether the worker’s connection to the vessel is genuinely sea-based. For Gulf of Mexico workers, the controlling case is Sanchez v. Smart Fabricators of Texas, L.L.C., 997 F.3d 564 (5th Cir. 2021) (en banc). Sanchez sharpened the inquiry by adopting three additional questions a court must ask:

1. Does the worker owe his or her work allegiance to the vessel, rather than simply to a shore-side employer?
2. Is the work sea-based, or does it involve seagoing activity?
3. Is the worker’s assignment to the vessel limited to performing a discrete task after which the connection ends, or does the assignment include sailing with the vessel from port to port or location to location?

Sanchez himself was a welder dispatched by a fabrication shop to weld on jack-up rigs. He was working aboard rigs at the time of his injuries, but the en banc Fifth Circuit held he was not a seaman because his work was performed on rigs jacked up adjacent to an inland dock, his assignments were discrete and short, and he went home each night. He was, in other words, more like a land-based contractor who happened to perform his work on a vessel than like a true sea-based worker.

The practical impact of Sanchez in our region is significant. Welders, electricians, riggers, and other contract specialists who service rigs and platforms must now show genuine sea-based engagement to qualify. That showing is fact-intensive and must be built from the very start of the case.

MORROW & SHEPPARD FEATURED CASE 
Griffin v. REC Marine Logistics, LLC, No. 3:20-cv-00092-BAJ-EWD (M.D. La. 2023), aff'd (5th Cir.) 

Morrow & Sheppard represented a deckhand who suffered serious shoulder and cervical-spine injuries during a personnel basket transfer operation aboard the M/V Dustin Danos in the Gulf of Mexico. The captain — on his phone, not attending to the operation — engaged the vessel's controls while the plaintiff was suspended in the basket. The vessel surged forward and the basket jerked violently. As a deckhand assigned to the vessel and performing core maritime duties on the water, the plaintiff sat squarely on the seaman side of the Sanchez line: his allegiance was to the vessel, his work was sea-based, and his assignment was ongoing crew service rather than a discrete shore-side task. 

After the firm developed percipient witness testimony establishing the vessel was moving during the transfer and retained maritime safety, life-care planning, vocational, and economic experts, a nine-person jury returned a unanimous verdict against REC Marine Logistics, LLC and Offshore Transport Services, LLC totaling $3.2 million — $1.7 million in compensatory damages and $1.5 million in punitive damages for the defendants' willful and arbitrary failure to provide maintenance and cure. 

The Fifth Circuit affirmed on appeal. With interest, costs, and attorneys' fees, the total recovery exceeded $4 million.

What Counts as a “Vessel”? The Stewart and Lozman Tests

The Jones Act analysis presumes the worker is connected to a vessel. That word has its own legal definition under 1 U.S.C. § 3, and it has been the subject of two important Supreme Court cases.

In Stewart v. Dutra Construction Co., 543 U.S. 481 (2005), the Court applied the statutory definition — every description of watercraft or other artificial contrivance used, or capable of being used, as a means of transportation on water — to a massive dredge that performed only limited self-propulsion. The dredge qualified as a vessel. Stewart confirmed that mobile, special-purpose craft can be vessels even when their primary work is stationary.

In Lozman v. City of Riviera Beach, 568 U.S. 115 (2013), the Court refined the test by asking whether a reasonable observer, looking to the structure’s physical characteristics and activities, would consider it designed to a practical degree for carrying people or things over water. A floating houseboat without any means of self-propulsion failed the test.

For Gulf workers, the practical question is whether a particular structure — a jack-up rig, a semi-submersible, a spar, a floating production unit, a barge, a crew boat — qualifies as a vessel for Jones Act purposes. Most do; a few do not. Fixed platforms generally are not vessels, but mobile offshore drilling units almost always are.

The Fleet Doctrine: Working Across Multiple Vessels

Many offshore workers are assigned not to a single vessel but to a group. The Jones Act accommodates that reality through the fleet doctrine, but with an important constraint set out in Harbor Tug & Barge Co. v. Papai, 520 U.S. 548 (1997).

To count as a fleet, the vessels must be under common ownership or control. A worker dispatched to whatever vessel needs help on a given day, across multiple unrelated employers, generally cannot aggregate that time. By contrast, a worker assigned to a fleet of supply boats owned by a single operator can pool service across the fleet to meet the duration prong.

This is the doctrine where many day-rate or hall-dispatched workers run into trouble. Careful documentation of the chain of corporate ownership behind each vessel is often essential.

Common Tactics That Strip Workers of Seaman Status… and How to Push Back

In our experience, employers and their insurers use several recurring strategies to deny seaman status:

• Reclassifying the worker as a longshoreman or LHWCA-covered employee in post-incident paperwork.
• Characterizing assignments as “transient” or “task-based” to invoke Sanchez.
• Pointing to a small portion of land-based duties to dilute the duration percentage.
• Treating each separate vessel of an interrelated operator group as standing alone, to defeat fleet aggregation.

The remedy in every case is the same: build the factual record promptly, before timesheets and rotation logs grow stale and before witnesses move on.

MORROW & SHEPPARD REAL CASE EXAMPLE :
In one Jones Act case, the defense tried to portray the client as a task-based worker because she was injured while moving heavy overloaded boxes of frozen chicken aboard a vessel.  However, we were able to demonstrate that the injured worker was performing supply and cargo work that supported the vessel’s mission and day-to-day operations. She was moving the overloaded boxes of frozen chicken through the vessel, including up stairs and through vessel passageways, so the vessel’s cafeteria could remain stocked and continue operating.  

We pushed back by focusing on the actual nature of the work. The client was not welding, repairing, or inspecting a vessel from the dock and then going home at the end of the day. She was working aboard the vessel, under the direction of vessel personnel, handling supplies needed for the vessel’s mission, and exposed to the same vessel-based hazards as the crew: narrow spaces, stairs, heavy loads, movement through the vessel, and pressure to keep operations going. After she reported her injury, the response also came through vessel personnel, including the captain and ship’s medical staff, further showing thats he was functioning within the vessel’s chain of command.  

Those facts helped defeat the defense’s attempt to misclassify the client as a temporary, task-based laborer. By developing the record around what the client actually did aboard the vessel, who directed the work, why the work mattered to the vessel, and how long she remained connected to vessel operations, we preserved the argument that she was a Jones Act seaman rather than a land-based worker who merely happened to be injured on a vessel.

What the Stakes Look Like in Practice

The financial difference between a Jones Act recovery and an LHWCA award can run into millions of dollars on a serious-injury case. A Jones Act seaman is also entitled to maintenance and cure, daily living expenses and medical care, without regard to fault, from the date of injury until maximum medical improvement. That right is independent of the negligence claim and often pays out long before any settlement or verdict.

Maintenance and cure also has teeth. Where an employer’s denial or delay of those benefits is willful and arbitrary, courts can award punitive damages on top of the underlying tort recovery. In Griffin — the basket-transfer case described above, the jury added $1.5 million in punitive damages for the defendants’ arbitrary refusal to pay maintenance and cure, and the Fifth Circuit affirmed. That kind of leverage simply does not exist for an LHWCA claimant.

If you have been injured offshore, the seaman question deserves a careful, individualized answer from a maritime injury lawyer who has tried these cases. It is not a question to leave to your employer’s safety manager, claims adjuster, or company-paid physician.

Talk to a Maritime Injury Lawyer Before You Talk to the Company

At Morrow & Sheppard LLP, we represent injured offshore workers throughout the Gulf of Mexico and across the United States. Our consultations are free and confidential. If a company representative is asking you to give a recorded statement, sign a release, or accept a quick payment in the days after an injury, contact us first. The questions discussed above — your duties, your time on vessels, the ownership of those vessels, and the nature of your assignment — are easier to answer accurately, and easier to prove later, when we are involved early.

Call our office today to speak with a maritime injury attorney about your case.

Disclaimer: This article is for general informational purposes only and is not legal advice. Reading or sharing it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Every offshore injury claim turns on its own facts. If you have been hurt at work on or around a vessel, contact a maritime injury attorney for advice on your specific situation.