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Sept 21 - Sept 28,2003 |
Injured workers risk impoverishment
Current compensation not abreast of cost of living forcing recipients to live in poverty
By Pier Paolo Bozzano
Originally Published: 2003-08-17
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.
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