Employers Employ Various Tactics to Deny Workers Compensation

Atlanta, GAEmployees who want to protect their rights with regard to workers' compensation need to stay informed, lest they find themselves led down the garden path. While workers' compensation law is pretty straightforward with regard to workers' compensation claims, not all employers are…

Case in point is an issue that arose with regard to a young woman employed at a factory in north Georgia. According to the Georgia Workers' Compensation Law Blog, the young woman had been told by her employer that carpel tunnel syndrome was not recognized as a workers' compensation qualifying injury, even if she hadn't been experiencing problems with numbness before.

Of course, says attorney Jody Ginsberg, who moderates the blog, this isn't exactly true. Incidence of repetitive motion injury (which often will result in a diagnosis of carpel tunnel syndrome) is, indeed a common workplace injury and as such falls under the jurisdiction of workers' compensation for the purpose of making a claim.

Ginsberg stresses that any employer who makes such an overture to an employee is either misinformed or downright dishonest.

The point is made that both employer, and insurer have a vested interest in avoiding claims where possible—since claims cost them real dollars in potentially increased premiums and payouts respectively. There are ways in which an employer can increase his chances of not being held to a claim, such as finding ways to delay the reporting of an injury or fostering a reporting inaccuracy on the part of a claimant, that may result in the minimization of a settlement or eradicating the claim altogether.

It has been reported that social networking sites are also being used by insurers and employers to push back at a worker having made a workers' compensation claim. For example, viewing a worker's Facebook page and gauging the amount of activity can help an employer build a case that the employee is, in actual fact capable of clerical work considering the individual's Facebook activity.

Provided a Facebook user has not activated privacy settings which restricts who can view pictures and postings (and most don't), anyone can see what's going on in an employee's social networking site—including an employer attempting to build a case for the filing of a false workers' compensation claim.

In the end, therefore the worker not only needs to know his rights with regard to workers' compensation, but needs to be savvy enough to realize what avenues an employer and his insurer may utilize to mitigate a legitimate claim.