What is a legal presumption? Can a legal presumption be rebutted by sufficient contrary evidence?Wisconsin workers’ compensation law contains many presumptions. For example, for firefighters, it is presumed that if a firefighter has cancer, the cancer is employment-related. The Statute applies to any State, County, or Municipal firefighter who has worked for ten years with at least two-thirds of the working hours as a firefighter who has cancer of the skin, breast, central nervous system, or lymphatic, digestive, hematological, urinary, skeletal, oral, or reproductive systems. 

When an employee settles a workers’ compensation claim, the employer often wants to terminate the employee and is cautious because of potential age discrimination.An individual who has been discriminated against because of his or her age may be entitled to back pay, reinstatement, hiring, promotion, front pay, liquidated damages, and court costs and attorney fees.

Benefits for injured workers continue to be under attack throughout the country. In New York, there have been a number of changes in the last decade, all in the name of reform. These reforms were encouraging at first as they increased the weekly benefits for some higher wage-earning injured workers for the first time in decades. They also created medical treatment guidelines under the guise of allowing injured workers to obtain pre-approval on certain medical treatments and procedures.  

If you’ve been injured on the job in the state of Colorado, it is technically legal for an employer to fire you during the process of a workers’ compensation claim.  However, employers are not legally able to fire employees out of retaliation because of the claim. They must present valid reasons for the termination.

If you are injured at work, most companies have workers’ compensation insurance to help pay for your medical expenses. Workers’ compensation insurance may also provide disability payments for time you have to take off work (usually around two-thirds of your normal salary). It may also pay additional benefits like retraining and future medical expenses, including rehabilitation.

Many people associate workers’ compensation with one-time catastrophic work accidents such as a construction worker falling from scaffolding or a carpenter losing a limb. While these types of devastating injuries are most certainly eligible for workers’ compensation, there are other injuries that can take months or even years to develop.  Repetitive strain injury workers’ compensation cases, sometimes called Mancini workers’ compensation cases, are also compensable under the Pennsylvania Workers’ Compensation Act.

When an employee of a subcontractor does work for another contractor, the Virginia Workers Compensation Commission may view the arrangement as that of a “borrowed servant” or “loaned employee” and make the supervising company pay comp benefits.

When OWCP sends you a letter telling you to do something, if there is an explicity threat that if you don't cooperate your benefits will be sanctioned, then you cannot ignore the letter. However, if the letter does not give you notice that there is a penalty for not responding, then you may want to consider whether or not you respond. 

If the Office of Workers Compensation Programs (OWCP) denies a FECA claim, the District Office’s decision should clearly state the reasons why the claim was denied. A common reason for denial is that the evidence submitted by the claimant does not satisfy the claimant’s burden of proof. Often a claim is denied because the medical evidence does not establish that the claimant’s medical condition was caused by a compensable (or work-related) factor. The OWCP requires the claimant to submit a report that provides medical rationale.

Every workers’ compensation case is different, and, often even tougher to reconcile, every state has different laws with respect to workers’ compensation.  Workers’ compensation is intended to provide wage replacement and medical benefits to injured workers.  In most jurisdictions, it’s also designed to compensate injured workers for the permanent disability they sustained.