What is the annual cost of workers’ compensation in Connecticut to businesses?
According to a Connecticut Office of Legislative Research report issued March 1, 2007, Connecticut was ranked 14th in the country in 2006 for workers compensation rates charged to employers: an improvement from 11th in 2004. In 2006, Connecticut’s premium rate was $2.90 per $100 of payroll while the 50-state median was $2.48. As the OLR report mentioned, some states strictly regulate rates charged to employers while Connecticut allows insurers to charge within rates approved by the Connecticut Insurance Department.
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In your experience, what is the biggest mistake companies make when dealing with workers’ compensation issues?
Employers are liable for the actions of supervisors and middle management. Often employers forget to train or retrain supervisors and middle managers on employment law and changes in the law. I can sympathize because there is a lot of law and a lot of changes to the law. Supervisors and middle managers are the gatekeepers to the ultimate decision makers.
However, we often see that they are also the individual accused of saying or doing something, or not saying or not doing something that is later claimed to be discriminatory or retaliatory. This is true whether the issue is family and medical leave, workers compensation claims, disability or other prohibited discriminatory and retaliatory acts. We urge our clients to seek advice pre-emptively. There are lots of great resources in addition to legal counsel. In addition, I would say that staying vigilant with safety and safety training for all employees is a critical component and where employers could often do a better job of protecting themselves as well as their employees.
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Doesn’t workers’ compensation guarantee you a job? Or does it just guarantee income?
No. The workers compensation statutes do not guarantee an employee a job. However, the thicket of laws related to employees who are injured or become ill due to a work related injury or exposure is impacting the way employers must handle positions filled by an employee who becomes injured or ill at work.
The easy guideline is that you don’t need to keep a position vacant. The next easy guideline is requiring a physician’s release for return to work, with or without restrictions as to the duties that reasonably relate to the duties of the job to which the worker is returning.
The stickier issues arise when the worker can work, but is now possibly considered disabled under state or federal law and requests a reasonable accommodation. Employers sometimes demand a return to work notice from a treating physician and will not permit the employee to return unless they are deemed “100% recovered”. This leads to possible violations of disability statutes.
Workers compensation statutes don’t guarantee income either. In order to be entitled to the statutory percentage of a worker’s weekly pay, injured workers must either be restricted from working entirely, or be medically cleared to work with restrictions that their employer cannot provide for, thereby requiring the injured employee to prove that they have searched for work elsewhere while being medically restricted from performing specific duties. An employee’s failure to comply will cause workers compensation carriers to stop sending weekly lost-wage benefit checks.
