What kinds of injuries are covered by workers’ comp?
Just about any kind of injury or illness is covered, so long as it is work-related.
In California, employees are entitled to workers’ compensation for any accidental injury or illness that arose out of and in the course of employment. This includes specific injuries from workplace accidents, injuries that arise over time from repetitive motion or overuse, occupational illnesses and toxic exposure, and even psychiatric injuries caused by mental stress.
Specific injuries from workplace accidents
An accident at work can be anything from a fall from a ladder or scaffold to a slip on a wet floor. Workers can get caught in machinery, struck or crushed by a forklift, electrocuted, burned, or struck by a flying or falling object. Some workplaces like construction sites are inherently dangerous, but even office environments can present slipping and tripping hazards or injuries from falling objects, broken stairs, slippery surfaces, or malfunctioning equipment. Muscle strains and sprains from lifting heavy objects or overexertion can also be compensable injuries.
Cumulative trauma
Jobs that involve performing the same repetitive motion can induce injuries such as tendonitis, neck and back pain, and carpal tunnel syndrome. Employees from jackhammer operators to computer operators are prone to cumulative trauma injuries. Hearing loss is also covered by workers’ compensation, whether it happened due to a single loud event or from working in a noisy environment over a long period of time.
Occupational disease
Workers’ compensation covers employees who get sick at work because of their job. This can be due to exposure to a harmful substance in the workplace, such as coal dust, baking flour, toxic chemicals or asbestos. Typically, the illness must be something specific to the job and not merely being exposed to a common illness in the workplace, unless the worker’s job puts the employee at an increased risk of catching the disease. For instance, health care workers and first responders who get COVID-19 are presumed to have contracted it at work, as are any other workers who got COVID-19 during an outbreak of the disease at the workplace.
Stress and Psychological Injuries
Mental disorders such as depression, chronic anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder are covered by worker’s comp when they were incurred on the job. Psychological injuries that are a symptom of physical injuries on the job are covered, as are purely mental injuries that are included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) and are at least 51% caused by work-related factors. Stress itself is not an injury, but it can create a physical or mental injury compensable by workers’ comp. Mental injuries are typically harder to prove; a workers’ compensation attorney can be a valuable asset in getting compensation for this type of harm.
