Injured workers risk impoverishment

Current compensation not abreast of cost of living forcing recipients to live in poverty

Does a workplace injury really entail getting tossed out of the game forever, wading through endless unpaid bills, risking poverty?
Our journey through the world of workplace injuries in Ontario begins from a brief document on the Daily Bread Food Bank, summarizing statistical data on its services in 2002 in Toronto and comparing them with the previous 15 years.
We get a nasty surprise: the injured represent a small but very significant part of the 155,000 people who asked for the food bank's assistance. Those 2,170 people, with a cheque from the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (the former Workers' Compensation Board) as their only income, cannot afford to buy enough food and must, therefore, use the bank.
What's more, in 1998 the percentage was way smaller, 0.5 percent of the total. The figure increased by 180 percent over four years: 1,395 poor injured workers.
The explanation, or part of it, lies in the failure to keep workers' compensations and pensions abreast of the cost of living: most of them have lost 14.6 percent of their purchasing power since 1996.
The decision by the Provincial Government to stop indexing the compensations to inflation was introduced in 1999. Official estimates of inflation rates were replaced with a complex formula based on half the inflation rate less one percent. Only a tiny fraction of injured workers, i.e. those with 100 percent disability, now receive a fully indexed compensation.
From 1985 to 1995 everybody got 100 percent indexing, from 1995 to 1998 they received three quarters of inflation less one percent for compensations and full indexing for disability pensions.
Let's compute an actual example. In 2003 inflation was of 3.2 percent. The formula devised cuts that in half, to 1.6 percent, and detracts another percentage point: as a result, pensions increased by 0.6 percent in a year when retail prices grew by 3.2 percent.
The year before that, when inflation was only of 1.9 percent, there was no increase whatsoever: half of 1.9 minus 1 computes to less than zero.
Over the past seven years compensations have grown by 2.3 percent, while prices by 16.9 percent. Injured workers have therefore lost 14.6 percent of their purchasing power since 1996.
Adequate compensation of workplace injuries forms the subject of an accurate research carried out by Melissa Di Benedetto of McMaster University. By tracing the history of governmental interventions, legislative measures, and opinions and stories of injured workers collected with questionnaires and interviews, the researcher painted a very accurate picture of the difficulties encountered by these people.
"Many of these injured workers," she writes, "must turn to some volunteer organization in order to get some financial assistance. Many receive help from their spouse, children or other family members. The only alternative is social assistance. When an injured worker cannot rely on help by his spouse, relatives or friends, he falls below the poverty line. Financial stress is also related to many other problems such as marriage failure, depression, shame, insecurity about one's future, and even suicide."
This is another aspect where numbers can be eloquent. The researcher reports the results of a survey on the economic conditions of injured workers. The starting point is a table on the poverty level compiled by Statistics Canada, based on population density in the place of residence and on family size. For instance, in 2000 the poverty line for people living in a mid-sized town (100,000 to 499,000 residents) in a family composed of two people was set at $19,697. Ontario injured workers were interviewed extensively about their income sources. The research turned out a very high percentage of injured workers living below or just above the poverty line. They cannot avoid asking friends, relatives, or social assistance to lend a hand. And yet nearly all of them, before suffering their injuries, had good economic conditions, and a few were even quite well to do.
The research concludes that our Province's system is full of holes and should be changed. The researcher suggests the adoption of new criteria based on independent assessment of a worker's economic and psychological condition. She also suggests to get injured workers and the associations advocating their interests more involved in the decision-making process, increasing their presence within the Compensation Board. The current situation is easy to improve upon: at present, in fact, no representative of the injured sits on the Board.
Part 2 in a four-part series.

Publication Date: 2003-08-17
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3048