What if your injury has left you with a permanent injury that prevents you from returning to your former job?
Phantom wage for a phantom job…
- If you are unable to find a suitable job, the workers’ compensation Board (WSIB) practice of ‘deeming’ will pretend you have a job.
- The Board can then reduce or eliminate your benefits by ‘deeming’ you to be receiving the wages from a job that you do not have and have no real hope of getting … (just over half of Canadians with disabilities are employed )
- While injured workers support recent legislation increasing Ontario’s minimum wage, it means however that the WSIB can deem workers at a high minimum wage – and reduce their benefits accordingly [see chart of the effects]
- Because of deeming, injured workers unable to get a job and unable to live on their compensation benefits are being forced onto social assistance and into poverty in increasing numbers.
Injured workers and their advocates have long called for wage loss compensation to be based on the worker’s “real life” employment situation.
- No Cuts Based on Phantom Jobs is one of the key demands of ONIWG’s Workers’ Comp Is A Right Campaign.
- Send a letter to the Premier and Minister of Labour demanding that they call a vote on Bill 57 – The Respecting Injured Workers Act, 2022. The bill would end deeming.
- The 2018 Backgrounder: The Problem with Deeming discusses the faulty presumptions behinds the Board’s policy and practice
Deeming or dreaming?
Although Labour Minister Steve Peters introduced changes in Bill 187 (2007) that he said would eliminate deeming (now called ‘determining’), the WSIB has in fact since expanded deeming by inventing the concept of “underemployment”. This means that even if a worker can find a job in the field he or she has been retrained for, the Board can still ignore their actual wages and deem them to be earning more than they actually do, if it thinks there is higher paying work out there.
The 72-month “lock-in” provides some protection by accepting that, after 6 years of permanent disability, the injured worker’s earning situation is not likely to improve and so at that point benefits will no longer be reviewed. However in practice that too is now being targeted to reduce the costs of long duration claims.
- Injured Workers Community Legal Clinic. 2021 Nov. 30. Submission to the Standing Committee on Bill 43.
- Ontario Network of Injured Workers’ Groups. 2019 Sep. Submission to the UN CRPD: Deeming Laws and Practices as Violations of the Rights of People with Work-acquired Disabilities in Canada.
- Ontario Network of Injured Workers’ Groups. Research Action Committee. 2019 May. Phantom Jobs, Empty Pockets.
- Noiles, Willy. 2017 Jul. 19. ONIWG deputation to the Standing Committee – on Bill 148, minimum wage and deeming (Youtube video)
- IWO Backgrounder. 2017 Jun. Minimum Wage and Deeming.
- Robert Storey. 2007. Deeming – It’s Just Wrong Toronto: Bancroft Institute. (IWHP bulletin, no. 4)