Can Your Employer Make You Use Vacation Pay After A Work Accident In Illinois?

No!!!!

I really can’t believe how many Illinois employers are trying to make their employees use vacation pay, sick time or other earned PTO after they get hurt on the job. If you get hurt at work and your doctor takes you off of work or gives you restrictions that your employer can’t accommodate, you get work comp benefits. Those benefits are called TTD or temporary total disability. It’s 2/3 of your average weekly wage, tax free.

Employers know this, but a lot of them want to screw you over if they can. So if they can get you to take a couple days of sick or vacation pay, that means your claim won’t cost them as much as you won’t have those hours to use later on in the year.

According to one injured worker who called me, there’s a very large Illinois employer who is taking this to the extreme. She said that this employer told her after a work accident that they have a new company policy that requires any injured worker to use one week’s worth of vacation pay if they are injured on the job.

Hopefully it’s obvious, but a company can’t create their own rules that decide they don’t have to follow Illinois work comp laws. This is very illegal. So far I’ve only heard about this from this one employee, but if I hear about it from another I will gladly name and shame this company.

This type of greedy corporate behavior doesn’t surprise me at all. It happens all of the time. It’s almost like a game of whack-a-mole in how they abandon one illegal strategy and then just start another.

The good news is that if you do use these hours, you can get them reinstated by formally filing a workers’ compensation case and showing that you have a work related injury. These are your hours. You shouldn’t lose your right to take a vacation after you get better or use sick time if you need it in the future for some reason.

One of the great things about working in Illinois is the State really does have a lot of strong, but fair laws for workers. The Illinois Workers’ Compensation Act is no exception. If your employer gets the benefit of your labor, they can’t make up their own laws if you get injured on the job. This is no different than them not getting to decide you should make less than minimum wage or anything else.