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”.

Login Register Subscribe

Feelings of employment security help injured workers heal faster: WCRI

Reprints
Feelings of employment security help injured workers heal faster: WCRI

Workers who are concerned that they may be fired after filing a workers compensation claim have longer disability durations than workers who feel secure in their employment, according to a series of reports released Thursday by the Workers Compensation Research Institute.

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based WCRI interviewed 3,200 injured workers last year in Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. Among that group, 47% of workers in North Carolina said they were somewhat or very concerned that they would be fired or laid off when they were injured — the highest percentage of the states studied by WCRI.

Workers who were concerned with losing their jobs after a workplace injury experienced a four-week increase in disability duration compared with workers who did not have such concerns, WCRI said. Lack of trust in an employee's job security after a work accident also correlated with claimant dissatisfaction with workers comp medical care.

“Among workers who were concerned about being fired, 20% reported big problems getting the services that they or their provider wanted,” WCRI said in the North Carolina report. “This rate was double the 9% among workers who were not concerned about being fired.”