Tag: Workers Comp

A New York police officer who was injured while stepping out of her patrol car during a coffee break was not entitled to accidental disability retirement benefits because she was not performing work duties at the time of the incident, a state appeals court has ruled.

The Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court on Thursday said the state was correct to deny accidental and performance-of-duty disability retirement benefits to Shelby Pileggi, who worked as a police officer for the town of New Castle in Westchester County.

Ms. Pileggi’s benefits petition stemmed from a February 2013 incident in which she slipped and fell while exiting her patrol car in the parking lot of a coffee shop near the police station. She suffered injuries to her back and neck.

Ms. Pileggi had argued that officers are always on duty even during brief breaks since they are required to respond to emergency calls, although she admitted she was on a personal errand at the time of the incident.

Her benefits petition was denied because she was engaged in a personal activity at the time she was injured.

The appeals court said Ms. Pileggi’s reliance on precedent under the state workers compensation law to justify her claim was misplaced, since accidental disability benefits are awarded under a separate section of law.

The appeals court ruled the benefits denial was proper. 

 

 

CARLSBAD, California — Getting a company’s executives to support a return-to-work program that effectively puts injured workers on light duty in-house is a numbers game, according to workers comp leader who in 2021 helped create such a program for a large transportation company.

Char Duffy, who ran the workers compensation program for Yellow Corp. Inc. before the Overland Park, Kansas-based company closed in 2023, said getting executives to listen involved spread sheets and charts: showing decision makers how much money they are losing by having injured workers out of work and how much a program could save them is key.

Presenting at the Workers’ Compensation & Risk Conference on Thursday, Ms. Duffy said “where I got their attention was that column of red,” regarding the company’s losses when it came to having injured workers out on temporary total disability, and other factors that affected claims. Yellow employed 30,000 workers.

In the first year, she was able to save the company $10 million by offering injured trucking employees the opportunity to work in the nonprofit sector: creating greeting cards for the military and doing so on-site. The changes implemented affected several parts of the work comp program at Yellow Corp., from reducing litigation rates – accounting for $3.3 million in savings over one year – to reducing lost days on new claims, accounting for $1.1 million in savings.

Presenting the company’s results on changes to its workers comp program implemented over one year, Ms. Duffy said companies often ignore how effective return-to-work, light-duty programs can be for the company’s bottom line. “They see workers comp as a sunk cost that they just have to pay,” she said.

Working with the program at Yellow, Christine Nickloes, Olde West Chester, Ohio-based operations manager at human resources consultant Sheakley Group Inc., said running statistics by executives also helps with buy-in: “the longer someone is off work, the chances of them coming back to work diminishes every day. Within six months, only 50% of your lost-time claimants will return to work. If they’re out for one year, it reduces down to 10%.”   

Getting unions involved was also a factor, Ms. Duffy said, adding that the greatest challenge was that union leaders wanted workers engaged in “meaningful work.” Many of the workers had been in the military prior, so the nonprofit work spoke to them, she said.

 

 

 

 

An Iowa appellate court on Wednesday denied an appeal by a man who sought additional workers compensation benefits after suffering off-the-job injuries he claims were directly connected to a workplace eye injury.

The Iowa Court of Appeals ruled that Robert Thomas failed to prove that injuries he suffered in June 2018 after stepping off a pontoon boat were directly related to a workplace injury to his right eye in January 2017.

After the work injury, Mr. Thomas underwent multiple eye surgeries but continued to have trouble with depth perception.

He claimed the eye problems contributed to the boat fall, during which he suffered a head laceration, three fractured teeth and maxillary sinus fractures.

A deputy comp commissioner agreed with Mr. Thomas and awarded healing period benefits, but the employer, Archer Daniels Midland Co., appealed, and the decision was later overturned by a comp commissioner, who also ruled the company was entitled to a credit for overpayment of benefits.

In its ruling, the appellate court said speculation over whether the boat incident was caused by the work injury was not enough to establish medical causation, and that the commission didn’t err in awarding the company an overpayment credit against the additional benefits. 

 

 

 

Help

BI’s Article search uses Boolean search capabilities. If you are not familiar with these principles, here are some quick tips.

To search specifically for more than one word, put the search term in quotation marks. For example, “workers compensation”. This will limit your search to that combination of words.

To search for a combination of terms, use quotations and the & symbol. For example, “hurricane” & “loss”.

There were 2.8 million nonfatal workplace injuries in private industry nationwide in 2022, up 7.5% from the prior year, according to figures released Wednesday by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Increases in both injuries and illnesses were driving factors behind the change from 2021, the BLS said, and the illness increase was attributed in large part to a rise in workplace respiratory cases.

There had been a decrease in respiratory illness cases in 2021. The BLS classifies COVID-19 as a respiratory illness.

The figures are based on employer self-reporting from the Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses.

The findings show that over the two-year, 2021-2022 period, there were 2.2 million cases involving days away from work, and the cases occurred at an annualized incidence rate of 112.9 cases per 10,000 full-time equivalent workers.

The National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, an educational and research group, released a statement Wednesday saying the BLS data proves the need for enhanced workplace safety training programs and prioritizing eliminating hazards such as the removal of toxic substances from job sites.  

“Workers more than anyone understand their jobs and worker-centered solutions lead to the most effective safety reforms that can prevent injuries and illnesses before they happen,” National COSH Co-Executive Director Jessica Martinez said in a statement. 

 

Human error was largely to blame for the workplace death of an Illinois sanitation worker who was crushed by a garbage truck during trash pickup services in Springfield in October 2022, according to a report released Monday by the Illinois Division of Occupational Safety and Health.

The employee was pinned between a garbage truck and a brick fence column.

The state report highlighted three contributing factors to the incident: the truck driver didn’t receive required training on hand signals, the victim and driver used audible signals instead of visual signals to communicate, and both workers failed to maintain visual contact while the truck was moving.

Employers in similar situations should also consider equipping large work vehicles with camera systems to enhance driver situational awareness, Illinois OSHA Chief Erik Kambarian said in a statement.

The division urged the sanitation department to provide initial and refresher training on safe vehicle operation policies for all employees to prevent similar future tragedies.

While the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration enforces many health and safety standards in Illinois, the state-level agency handles workplace safety incidents involving local and state government workers.  

 

 

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration said Tuesday it cited Maplewood, Minnesota-based 3M Co. after a worker died at its Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, facility in May after becoming caught in a machine’s rotating rollers.

OSHA cited 3M for two willful safety violations and proposed $312,518 in penalties.

The company, OSHA said, failed to use proper procedures designed to control hazardous energy and it failed to implement energy control application steps when workers set up the production line by threading through powered rollers by hand.

OSHA said 3M, a Fortune 200 company, also allowed employees to circumvent machine guarding to cut and remove wrapped fibers from rotating powered rollers and remove fibers from the floor, exposing them to caught-in hazards.

3M, which manufactures various commercial and industrial products such as insulation and adhesives, operates 40 production plants across the U.S. It has 15 days to contest the citation and proposed penalties.

The company had another fatality in February 2022 at its facility in Alexandria, Minnesota.   

 

 

A Pennsylvania appeals court on Monday upheld a determination by a workers compensation judge that limited to medical benefits only a claim petition filed by a correctional officer who says he was declared legally blind in one eye following a workplace injury.

The Commonwealth Court said a comp judge correctly found John Sherman, who worked as a Mercer County prison guard, was entitled to medical benefits for an eye injury he sustained in May 2019 after being accidentally sprayed with a chemical disinfectant.

The judge had also ruled that Mr. Sherman was not entitled to wage loss benefits for loss of use of his left eye because he failed to prove a subsequent diagnosis saying he was legally blind in the injured eye was directly caused by the work site incident.

Mr. Sherman initially sought only medical benefits but amended his claim petition during the August 2019 comp hearing to also seek wage loss benefits.

A comp appeals board affirmed the judge’s determination, and the Commonwealth Court said the board correctly upheld the ruling denying the wage loss component of the claim because Mr. Sherman failed to prove his legal blindness was tied to the workplace accident and not other health-related issues such as diabetes that could affect eyesight health. 

 

Insurance premium renewal rates climbed in October in five out of six lines of coverage tracked by Ivans Insurance Services, a unit of Applied Systems Inc.

Commercial property insurance rates increased the most, rising by an average 10.4% last month, compared with 9.9% in September.

In other lines, business owners policy rates increased 8.8%, compared with 7.6% in the prior month; commercial auto was up 8.5%, compared with 7.4%; umbrella rates were up 6.2%, compared with 5.2%; and general liability rates rose 5.7%, compared with 5.3%.

The only major line to see a decrease was workers compensation, where rates fell 1.3%, a slight slowdown from the 1.4% decrease in September.

The analysis is based on information from 38,000 agencies and 600 insurers, Ivans said in a statement.