By Rolf Harrison, Workers’ Advocate BC Building Trades
A MONTH AGO, BOB GOT INJURED at work. He’s on crutches and in a lot of pain. The company’s disability manager is texting him daily about modified duties:
Your doctor’s letters aren’t clear enough!”
“We expect you here at 7 a.m.!”
“Doing what your surgeon says is NOT how these situations work!”
30 days of texts like these. Meanwhile, Bob is still waiting for a wage loss payment. He calls WorkSafeBC to ask what’s taking so long.
“The company sent a lot of new evidence,” his adjudicator says, directing Bob to view it online.
There he finds that the disability manager has been faxing letters every few days. Not much in the way of “evidence”, but lots of rants, accusing Bob of all sorts of things:
He hurt himself away from work.”
“He’s faking his supposed injury.”
“He’s hiding from us. He has not even attempted to co-operate.”
More than a dozen letters with false accusations. Bob calls his adjudicator again: “I just want to make sure that you know this: the disability manager is making it up as he goes along. He did the same thing to the guys I work with. I don’t know how I’m supposed to recover like this. My bills are piling up. I can’t sleep. My stress is through the roof!”
Soon Bob receives an email with a decision. Claim allowed. Wage loss payments approved. The message says nothing about the company’s accusations, one way or the other.
It goes without saying that this is no way to recover from an injury. No employer that uses these abusive tactics against workers should be entrusted with supporting their recovery.
Yet this is standard practice for an increasing number of companies. And as bad as it is for the individual worker, there is a darker side to it. While these disability managers may not be very good at convincing WorkSafeBC to deny benefits, what they do excel at is making the claims process extremely stressful for the worker.
They know that WorkSafeBC almost never penalizes this misconduct, enabling them to do it to worker after worker no matter how serious their injuries. The company’s goal is to make the claims process so awful that employees are deterred from pursuing compensation the next time they get hurt on the job.
It’s true that some employers don’t interfere much in claims. Workers can have good claims experiences. But far too many employers behave like Bob’s. It has only gotten worse in the past year with the rollout of “duty to co-operate” policies that bad employers have weaponized to pressure workers into unsuitable modified duties.
Solutions are not hard to find. Our laws and policies governing claim suppression, benefit suppression and the duty to co-operate can easily be broadened to ensure that this type of employer misconduct is more clearly an unlawful offence. And WorkSafeBC could take a more active role facilitating modified duties instead of the current “hands off” approach that enables employer abuse.
But the root cause for bad behaviour remains. WorkSafeBC incentivizes this conduct by assessing each employer’s premiums based on their individual “experience rating” and so employers benefit financially from claim and benefit suppression. We need to eliminate the reward system for claim and benefit suppression and return to basing employer premiums on the industry average, as we used to.
In a sane compensation system, employer misconduct like this would be a heavily penalized offence. Instead, our system both turns a blind eye to the misconduct and rewards it. The job before us is to force our provincial government and WorkSafeBC to stop this practice dead in its tracks.