17. What is Workers Compensation?
Deezer In this episode Jonathan Rosenfeld chats with Jim Hardy an Attorney at Taxman, Pollock, Murray, & Bekkerman, LLC. Here, they discuss:
Workers Compensation
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Jonathan Rosenfeld:
Hello everybody, thank you for tuning into the personal injury podcast. I am Jonathan Rosenfeld, and today I am joined by Jim Hardy. Jim is an experienced work comp attorney at Taxman, Pollock, Murray, and Bekkerman in Chicago. And we are going to talk today about the preliminary areas of workers' compensation. Jim, thanks for joining me today. I appreciate it.
Jim Hardy:
Thank you, Jonathan.
Jonathan Rosenfeld:
I appreciate you joining me. Could you just give us a little bit of background about your position and your experience with work comp?
Jim Hardy:
Sure. I'm a partner at Taxman, Pollock, Murray, Bekkerman and we're a personal injury workers' comp law firm. I am the head of the department that handles the work comp claims in the office. I'd been doing work comp my entire career and exclusively, that's all I do is work comp cases. I've been involved in the Illinois Work Comp Lawyers Association for about 12 years now. That's the state bar association for work comp lawyers, 700 members strong. And I was a recent president two years ago of the organization after being on the board for about 10, 12 years prior to that. So a lot of experience in work comp and I'm happy to share my information and knowledge.
Jonathan Rosenfeld:
Awesome. So to begin with, I think one of the preliminary questions that a lot of people have, and this is sort of a massive question, but if you could just sort of give us a little breakdown of what workers' compensation is and sort of how the system came to be, that would be great.
Jim Hardy:
Sure. So the work comp system is something that started up back in the industrial age, back in the 1920s and each state has their own law with regard to work comp. It's not a federal system. So each state has an act and in Illinois, they have the Illinois Work Comp Act that lays out the rights and the benefits that injured workers have in the state of Illinois. And so basically it takes over if you're injured while performing your work duties. It takes over from your regular insurance that you might have, the group health carrier, it takes over from them and pays the medical bills. And that's the primary benefit. They pay all reasonable, necessary and related medical bills. And the second benefit in the Illinois Work Comp Act is payment for lost earnings. So in other words, due to the injury, if you have a doctor's note that takes you off work, then the work comp insurance pays you and they pay you a certain percentage of your old wages. And then you get that tax free. It comes to about what you may take home after taxes prior to the work accident.
Jim Hardy:
And the third benefit and the most important one is that you're entitled to and you have a right to a settlement in work comp, and that's based on the nature and extent of the injury, the permanency of the injury. And those are the three basic benefits, but they're all very important. And it's very common that if you have a work comp case, that you can start with an adjuster and the adjuster will give you benefits, but you don't know if she's giving you or he's giving you the correct amount in the benefits, doing the calculations correctly, paying the bills correctly, paying for all the treatment that's being recommended. So that's why, in addition to securing a settlement, that's why it's important to have an attorney on your side helping you through the process.
Jonathan Rosenfeld:
So I guess to begin with, who is covered under workers' compensation? Is everyone covered under workers' compensation under the law?
Jim Hardy:
Almost everybody in the state of Illinois. There are certain exceptions to that and they're rare. In the statute, city of Chicago, policemen and firemen are excluded from the Illinois Work Comp Act because they have their own disability system, duty disability system. Other than that, there are exceptions for independent contractors. If you're, this is quite similar to what happens in the trucking industry where you're an owner-operator, you're an independent contractor and you get paid on a 1099, so you're really your own employee. You have your own company, even though you're working for a trucking company and they're paying you.
Jim Hardy:
So in that situation, the independent contractor wouldn't be covered under the trucking company's work comp insurance coverage, but frequently the independent contractor will have their own policy that they take out for themselves and they'd be covered under that. And then other than that, pretty much everybody is covered except for some exceptions, for family farm workers and so forth. But it's pretty wide ranging, if you're performing work for an employer and you're getting paid for it, even if it's cash, they are supposed to have work comp insurance that covers you under state law. So it's pretty wide ranging, if you're working in Illinois getting paid for your work, then you're likely covered.
Jonathan Rosenfeld:
So this covers part-time employees, it would cover someone who's got a summer job or something as well?
Jim Hardy:
Sure. Yeah. Part-time employees you're covered doesn't matter, first day on the job, covered, doesn't matter. That's fine. You don't have to be there a certain length of time. You could even, a situation where you're doing temporary work, you're only going to work for somebody seasonal, for the summer or something like that. You're still covered because you're an employee and you're on the books there as an employee. And they, under state law, that employer has to cover you for the work comp insurance. So that's how it works and it's a fairly good system.
Jonathan Rosenfeld:
Under the law in Illinois, employers are required to carry workers' comp insurance. Is that correct?
Jim Hardy:
That's correct. If they don't, then the Illinois Department of Insurance can fine that employer and they do enforce that pretty heavily. And there are fines for the number of days that you're going without insurance. If the lapses, the employer can get hit with penalties and fines for that, or if it's an employer that simply does not, refuses just to carry work comp, the state of Illinois can come in and shut that business down until such time that they do purchase and buy a work comp insurance policy. They're pretty strict so it's rare to find a situation where the person is not covered when they're supposed to be.
Jonathan Rosenfeld:
Okay. So in Illinois, everyone's required to have work comp insurance. And I guess obviously, when we talk about workers' comp, we're typically talking about, for the most part, we're talking about an acute injury, an accident for the most part. And this could be a fall, this could be an auto accident. This could be really anything that an employee is doing in furtherance of their employment, correct?
Jim Hardy:
That's correct.
Jonathan Rosenfeld:
That's basically the encompassing definition of work comp coverage in Illinois?
Jim Hardy:
That's correct. And that was the idea behind the law is to help injured workers who are performing their duties and they're injured. And so that they're not just, in the old days before they have work comp, of course they were just left hanging and there was no insurance, of course. Back in the old days, somebody would get hurt, they just keep working or they would, if they had any money to go to a doctor, they try and go to a doctor, but there was no safety net. So then the states came in with these laws and it's precisely that, to help people who are injured at work. And there are certain rules about what's covered. Some things, it's important to get an attorney to check, because some things that you think might not be covered under a work comp or some activities at which you were injured might not be covered, but they are.
Jim Hardy:
For instance, the classic parking lot cases. If you punch out and you're walking to your car in the company parking lot where you've been designated to park at and you slip and fall on ice on the way out there, or trip and fall on some landscaping or something like this, that's covered under work comp, because you're still covered. You're still in the furtherance of the employer and performing work duties because you have to park your car in order to help your employer by going into their facility to work. So the work comp law says that you're covered as long as you're parking in an employee owned and maintained and designated parking lot under work comp. Bu...