If you get injured on the job, you may understandably be worried that your workers’ comp claim is going to be denied. This fear is especially common when you caused your own injury. For instance, maybe you slipped and fell off of the ladder or you touched a live wire without checking to see if the power was off.
Is that really a reason to deny workers’ comp, though? Or do you still have a right to benefits even if an accident was your fault?
You can usually still get workers’ comp
Overall, you can generally get workers’ comp under no-fault laws, even if you were somehow responsible for your own injury. It may have been your own mistake, but it’s still something that happened at work. In that sense, your job still caused the injury.
There are cases where benefits get denied, but those are exceptions to the rule and require you to knowingly cross certain lines and behave recklessly. Maybe you were engaging in horseplay, for instance. Maybe you had some drinks at lunch and were slightly impaired when you got back to work.
In other words, if you did something abnormal, that was not part of your job and expressly forbidden, and that action caused your injury, then your claim may be denied. If you caused the injury through an ordinary mistake while doing your job as you normally do, though, then the fault doesn’t matter. No one is expected to be perfect. You just can’t recklessly make an injury more likely.
Seeking proper coverage for a workplace injury
You need to provide for your family after an injury, so you must know what legal steps to take to seek the workers’ compensation benefits you deserve. If your claim has been unfairly denied, you have a right to fight back.