Backgrounder – Experience rating
Experience rating (ER), a financial incentive program for employers used by the WSIB to promote occupational health and safety, is not achieving its goals but instead hurts injured workers in many ways. Employer resources are diverted from workplace safety improvement towards claims management and suppression (discouraging the reporting of accidents and filing of workers’ claims). ER programs also fail in supporting successful return to work. Proposed changes look at insurance equity rather than the addressing the core problems with the program.
Backgrounder – Deeming and the lock-in
Phantom jobs, phantom wages… Instead of looking at what the injured worker is actually able to earn in suitable and available employment, the Board deems (or dreams) most injured workers to have returned to full time gainful employment after their injury, regardless of their real life situation… and then reduces or eliminates their loss of earnings benefits by this deemed wage. Backgrounder also discusses the threat to remove the 72-month lock-in of benefits, without which injured workers will find themselves under “perpetual probation”.
Backgrounder – New WSIB benefits policies
A summary of the developments and funding/cost-cutting rationale leading up to the Board’s implementation of new benefits policies; with analysis of the general approach under decision makers ‘look to deny’ by questioning work relatedness every step of the way. The main way this is achieved is by repeatedly raising the issue of pre-existing conditions. Backgrounder discusses how these policies reject the legal principles (including the thin skull doctrine) and instead try to ‘medicalize’ the decision-making process through not only challenging causation but use of “expected recovery times” – rather than individualized assessment – as a tool to cut off benefits. (Originally published in Justice For Injured Workers Jan. 2015 issue).
Fact sheet – What do injured workers want
The four key demands of the injured workers movement, and key provisions from the 2004 Platform for Change document (summary of draft revision)
Fact sheet – No Minister, the real facts about injured worker benefits
In response to a statement in the Legislature, statistics from 2004-2013 show that cost of living adjustments for compensation benefits have in fact not kept pace with inflation – in real value they have shrunk by 9.6%.
Download Fact sheet – No Minister, the real facts about injured worker benefits
Injured workers and poverty
Key findings from the ONIWG Injured Workers and Poverty Survey 2010/2011.
Fact sheet – Universal workers’ compensation coverage
Almost 30% of Ontario’s workers are not covered. Who is not covered, and why it matters.
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Backgrounder – Workers’ compensation finances – crisis or smokescreen?
On eve of the Funding Review, this paper asks if the concern about the Board’s “unfunded liability” is a smokescreen for reducing compensation benefits to keep low rates for employers? A detailed look at the unfunded liability, funding options and alternatives to reducing benefits and services. Paper compares the government’s treatment of injured workers in times of recession, with cuts to cost of living adjustments that reduced the value of benefits by almost 30%, while employers’ rates were reduced and rebates increased. As the WSIB’s own data showed, if employers’ assessment rates had simply been kept at the 1996 level, by the year 2006 there would have been no unfunded liability.
Download Backgrounder – Workers’ compensation finances – crisis or smokescreen?
Fact sheet – Why do we have an unfunded liability?
Recent history shows workers paid with benefit cuts, employers “enjoyed” reduced premium rates – building up the current unfunded liability.