Are you an employee of a company? What do you know about your workers’ compensation rights? Most employees know very little about this protection. By law in the state of Florida, every employer with more four or more employees, (or 1 in the construction field) must carry Workers compensation insurance. This covers injuries and illnesses caused “during the scope of your employment”.
What Workers’ Compensation Means:
It means that if you suffer an injury or illness during “the scope of employment” you are entitled to certain benefits, both medical and wages. This term “scope of employment” is important to workers’ compensation claims. It widens the possibility of obtaining benefits if you are injured doing things such as: going to a networking event; taking a bank deposit for work or any other action that serves a business purpose. The injury or illness does not have to occur in your job space, it can even be because you caused it.
In Florida, the standard rate for temporary total disability benefits is 2/3 of your pre-injury wages. This financial security can help make a difficult situation a little easier.
Corona Virus COVID-19 Coverage
Until now if someone told you that you could make a claim against your employer’s workers’ compensation insurance for being sick you probably wouldn’t believe them. However, in the world of COVID-19 workers who are in a high-risk job during this time and contract the virus because of this high-risk job may be entitled to workers’ compensation benefits.
What Information is Needed for a Claim?
The next question becomes how you prove you caught this disease from preforming your job. In some cases, this can be easy in others it is more complicated. The Healthcare industry and first responders are examples of the easy case. Working at a grocery store or other essential service job is a little more challenging.
We need to look at all the facts before we can decide whether the claim is valid and should be submitted to the workers’ compensation insurance carrier.
Do I Need an Attorney?
Proving an illness such as COVID-19 came from working can be a difficult task. Workers’ compensation attorneys work to gather all the facts from the various sources and communicate to the insurance company on your behalf. The goal of the insurance carrier is to contain costs. They are on the side of the employer. A workers’ compensation attorney helps balance this process, by advocating for you. This gives you, the client the best chance of receiving some form compensation for your injury or illness.