Covering the Bases of Workers’ Compensation

Written by Gary Christmas, Christmas Injury Lawyers

Workers’ compensation provides benefits to employees who get injured or sick from a work-related cause or incident. It provides wage replacement and disability benefits to those who are victims of injury on the job and death benefits to the families of victims. Workers’ compensation, otherwise known as workers comp, is state-regulated, meaning each state’s legislature determines their own laws, how the laws benefit employees, and how these laws are implemented. Texas is the only state in the United States to not call for private employers to carry workers’ compensation benefits for their employees.

History of Workers’ Compensation

According to an article released by The Legal Examiner, many historians of workers’ compensation attribute the United States system to both Europe and Germany. Germany created the first worker’s compensation laws, known as the Sickness and Accident Laws, which were implemented into the legislature in 1884. England was right behind Germany, passing its own set of workers’ compensation laws in 1897.

According to the nonprofit Workers’ Compensation Research Institute, The United States adopted their own set of workers’ compensation laws in 1908 which covered federal civilian employees. More states enacted similar laws between the years 1910 and 1920. The first comprehensive state workers’ compensation law was passed in Wisconsin in 1911, with nine other states following and implementing their own programs and regulations in the same year.

Life Before Workers’ Compensation

In 1913, The Bureau of Labor Statistics documented approximately 23,000 work-related fatalities within a workforce of 38 million. This rate of deaths is equal to 61 deaths for every 100,000 employees.

Before workers’ compensation in the United States, it was common to assume that if an employee showed up to work, they accepted the risk involved with the job. If injured, workers had the responsibility to prove negligence of their employers through long and often expensive legal battles. Injured workers had to fight for medical expenses, lost wages, and other expenses related to their injury.

Securing a payment was a lengthy battle with no guarantee of a payoff. According to the Social Security House of Policy, even in accidents resulting in the death of an employee, only about half of the victims’ families would receive any form of payment. In the event they did, it was barely a year’s salary.

How do those injured benefit from workers’ compensation?

The purpose of workers’ compensation programs is to provide injured employees with financial assistance and to protect employers by limiting liability. Workers’ compensation can help those injured on the job with medical expenses, including emergency room visits, prescriptions, and necessary surgeries. Workers’ compensation also covers missed wages, repetitive injury, disability, and in the most unfortunate cases, funerals.

Issues/problems with workers’ compensation

Even though these laws are made to protect both the employee and the employer, workers’ compensation cases can become complex and confusing. One of the most pressing issues injured employees face is the polarized system providing employees workers’ compensation benefits or no benefits at all. Although many people are capable of navigating the workers’ compensation process on their own, knowing the law in each state is essential and creates better outcomes for victims of work-related injuries. Having a lawyer who is familiar with the state’s workers’ compensation laws and has experience in workers’ comp cases gives the injured an advantage and provides them with proper representation.