Reasons Why Employees Should Have Workers' Compensation Insurance
The topmost priority of many enterprises is ensuring their employees are safe at work. However, it is not always possible to protect them against unavoidable accidents, falls, or diseases. Although it may be hard to protect staff against all work-related injuries and accidents, the company can ensure their employees have workers' compensation insurance that covers them against losing their earnings or covering their own medical bills. Here are three questions that employees may have about workers' compensation insurance.
Which Medical Costs, If Any, Does It Cover?
Different companies and working environments make staff vulnerable to work-related injuries and accidents. Physical environmental hazards such as poor air quality, slippery floors resulting in slips, trips, or falls, and excessive radiation from machinery can harm workers, causing respiratory illness, broken bones, fractures, and cancers. These health issues translate to high medical costs. Thus, with workers' compensation insurance, an employee is entitled to adequate medical care, including hospital visits, diagnosis, treatments, and prescriptions, without incurring extra medical costs.
How Will It Cover My Lost Wages?
Short- or long-term work-related injuries may affect a worker's productivity and efficiency. Thus, with poor health, most workers cannot work for some time, translating to a loss of wages. Being injured on the job can be stressful and overwhelming when the employee loses their means of income. Thus, a staff member must seek workers' compensation insurance coverage to protect themselves against loss of wages. The policy helps the employee with what they need when recovering from a work-related illness or injury. In the event of the death of a staff member from a work-related incident, the recovered lost wages will help the deceased's dependents cover any extra expenses.
How Does It Protect Against Employer Retaliation?
A staff injured in the line of duty is often entitled to a workers' compensation benefit. These benefits emanate from the workers' compensation insurance. However, some employers may fail to pay compensation benefits to their staff based on their filed claims. After an employee files a claim for benefits, employers may retaliate by demoting, firing, or denying a promotion to the injured worker. They may also give an undeserving negative performance review for the claim. To avoid these retaliations, employees should have a workers' compensation insurance policy that prevents their employers from discriminating against them. It not only offers the worker compensation against work-related injuries but acts as the sole remedy against employer retaliation.