An Overview of The Workers’ Compensation System

All intelligent employers realize that no worker is like a robot. Any employee might get sick, and might need to stay home for a day or two. Sometimes a worker needs a longer period at home. The Workers’ Compensation System arranges for coverage of an employer if a worker becomes seriously ill, gets injured on the job or must deal with some psychological or stress-related issue.

Procedural rules for using the Workers’ Compensation System

The employee must file a claim through the state’s authorized agency. The employee that has filed such a claim cannot sue the employer. The employer has arranged for coverage of ill or injured employees by making monetary contributions to the Compensation System.

Benefits offered to the covered ill or injured employees

The System’s coverage ensures such employees of reimbursement for money spent on medical bills. In addition, it furnishes deserving employees with disability payments. Those get classed according to the nature of the worker’s disability.

Some of the payments cover the income lost by an employee with a temporary disability. Others replace the lost income of someone with a permanent medical problem. Someone that seems unable to recover from an illness or an injury joins the group of employees with a permanent disability.

At the same time, the employees’ disabilities get classed as either total or partial. That classification scheme directs the size of the payment that will be made to the disabled worker. According to the Workers’ Compensation System, someone with a partial disability does not need as large a payment, because he or she can earn some income by using those faculties that were not affected by the illness or injury.

For how long will a worker’s benefits be made available?

The System pays out those benefits until the recipient has recovered, and is ready to return to the workplace. A team of authorities determines when that time has arrived. The worker’s doctor, the employer, the System’s claim administrator and the worker’s lawyer consult together, before arriving at the date for the employee’s return to the workplace.

The team’s decision might rule against such a return. Alternatively, it might suggest that the recovered employee start back on a part time basis. Sometimes, returning workers follow a part time schedule for a few weeks or months, and then resume the former full time schedule, on the advice of the Personal Injury Lawyer in Hamilton.

Note that the supervisor plays no part in deciding when the absent worker will be joining the other members of his or her team, within the workplace. Still, a part-time worker often needs to get a supervisor’s signature on a weekly time sheet. Those two facts can work to bring a quick end to the suggested part-time schedule.