Of misconceptions regarding workers’ compensation, perhaps the most blatant is that it’s filled with bogus injury claims from people trying to milk the system. ”Some people do [think that], but then they get hurt,” said Matthew Carey, assistant director of the Workers Compensation Unit in the state Department of Labor and Training – then it’s a whole different ballgame.
“People get hurt and [they] get hurt at work. It’s a fact of life,” Carey said. “Over 90 percent of [workers comp claims] are not a scam,”
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The R.I. Workers Compensation Unit counts about 33,000 total work-related injuries a year, last year about 7.5 percent of covered employees out of a resident workforce that numbered 482,900. Injury claims have dropped dramatically from 10 years ago, when it was about 40,000 claims a year.
There were 8,995 injuries reported last year in Rhode Island that were serious enough to warrant time lost from work. The most injuries, 2,797 or 31 percent, were reported in service industries, followed by manufacturing with 2,020 ( 22.4 percent) and retail with 1,488 or (16.5 percent).
Just 7.4 percent of these injuries were in construction and 7.2 percent in transportation, commercial and public utilities.
The most common injury types were overexertion (30.7 percent), falls (20.6 percent), and being “struck,” as by a piece of machinery or equipment (19 percent). “There’s a million ways” to hurt yourself at work, Carey said, underscoring another classic workers’ comp misconception, that most claims are filed within industries such as manufacturing or at heavy-lifting sites like warehouses. But it’s just as easy, Carey said, for a sedentary bank employee to get hurt sitting down at a chair as it is for a hugely muscled laborer to get injured operating a forklift.
Injuries such as bodily reactions, being caught in or under, contact with caustics, motor vehicle accidents, being “rubbed or abraded,” and injuries resulting from temperature extremes were all under 6 percent last year. Assault counted for less than 1 percent of all injuries, and statistics show that the frequency of each type of injury was fairly constant over the last 10 years.
Types of occupational illnesses range from lung disease to eye damage to stress, Carey said, “anything that’s work related.”
What that means is often debated, for although injuries or illnesses may not have to occur “on the job site” they do have to exist “in the course of employment.” For example, someone getting injured working at home might be covered if said employee was “where you’d be reasonably expected to be.”
That, too, is subject to interpretation, which is why there’s workers comp court to rule on such issues, which also range from the employee who falls getting out of her car in the office parking lot to stress-related injuries from a job that’s mentally high-pressure.
Workers’ compensation is a no-fault system that requires employers to maintain insurance coverage to protect employees from a work-related loss of earnings and medical expenses. The laws provide fixed monetary awards designed to eliminate the need for litigation and provide benefits for dependents of workers killed because of work-related accidents or illnesses.
There are two types of injury – lost time, which is a work related injury or occupational illness causing more than three days of lost work, and medical only, a work related injury of illness that requires medical attention where up to three days of work may be lost.
Under the Rhode Island’s Workers’ Compensation Act, employers are responsible to report any injury sustained by an employee which has been described as work-related and which incapacitates the employee from earning full wages for at least three days or requires medical treatment, despite the period of incapacity. Workers’ comp covers all paid employees, full and part time, and is designed to protect employees by replacing their income, with absolutely no deductibles, Carey said.
It’s paid for by employers and their insurers, and naturally there must be medical evidence documenting any such disability.
The educational unit at the state Workers Compensation Division conducts seminars on various topics and provides safety training with employers and employees, plus seminars on legislative changes with attorneys, insurance people and employers, Carey said.
Services are free and include establishing loss prevention programs, designing occupational safety programs, onsite “safety walk-throughs,” a video lending library, ergonomic audits and analysis and an informational telephone line. For more information call 222-3994.
