Recently Takeda Pharmaceuticals in Deerfield announced that they would be closing, costing 1,000 workers their jobs. These types of closings happen all of the time of course. The question is, if you have a work related injury in Illinois and your company shuts down, how does that affect your case?
Under Illinois work comp law you get three types of benefits, medical, TTD (lost time payments) and PPD which is a settlement at the end. Let’s look at each benefit individually.
Medical: If your company closes it should not impact your rights to medical care unless the company was self insured and is going bankrupt. So while Takeda is closing in Deerfield, the company still exists. If you are one of their workers and were injured before they shut down here, you still get 100% of your medical care paid for. Nothing changes. If the company isn’t self insured, which is most companies, still nothing changes as it’s their insurance company that is paying you benefits.
TTD: When you are hurt at work and can’t do your job, you get temporary total disability benefits or TTD which is 2/3 of your average weekly wage. When a company shuts down, if you have been working on restrictions from a work injury, you would suddenly go from not getting TTD to being entitled to TTD until you have a full duty work release or your restrictions become permanent. If you were on TTD before the shut down, you still are entitled to TTD. So for most workers either nothing changes or you get benefits because you have restrictions. Once the restrictions are permanent you have to start looking for other work and should get paid until you can find something.
PPD: Whether the company is open or not doesn’t change the fact that you are entitled to a settlement of some sort. The value of that might increase if you have no job to go back to and it really just depends on your injury and how severe it is. In some cases you may have been able to work with restrictions at the old job, but can’t do that in any other job. So the value of your case could go from the mid five figures to the mid six figures. It really is case dependent.
Bonus tip. You might get offered a job in another state with the company. If you turn it down it should not impact your job in any way. Basically you can’t be made to move across country and if you choose not to it shouldn’t hurt your work comp case.
Bottom line is that companies do close and with respect to workers’ compensation claims it should not hurt you. If you have any questions about any of this please call us for a free consultation any time.
