My son had a great English teacher who made everyone in the class do a presentation on various topics once a month. It helped him be comfortable with public speaking and made him a good writer as well. There was only one guiding principle in doing these presentations. You had to answer the question, “Why should I care?”
I love that concept. It’s something I try to remember in my daily life. Often it gets me to not say anything because I think to myself that nobody would care.
When it comes to Illinois workers’ compensation law, you definitely should care. Illinois has the best laws in the country for workers who get hurt on the job. There are a lot of politicians and others who are trying to gut those laws. It’s incredibly important that that doesn’t happen.
As we all know, life is really expensive these days. If you get hurt at work and don’t have the protections of the Illinois Workers’ Compensation Act, you could quickly be homeless or bankrupt. States like Indiana, Kansas, Texas and others limit what you can get from a work related injury and make it very difficult to find a lawyer to help you if your benefits are disputed. And there are either caps or low benefit amounts in many states where the rights and needs of workers aren’t considered.
People that don’t care don’t envision themselves getting hurt on the job or needing work comp benefits. It’s obvious a heavy duty laborer, truck driver or factory worker should care about these laws. Those jobs are high risk and have injuries all of the time. But why should a low risk job like teacher, business person or bank teller, you might not think this will ever effect you.
Aside from the fact you should have empathy for others, I can tell you that we have helped thousands of teachers, bank tellers, business people and others who are in seemingly “low risk” jobs. Any job can and does lead to an injury. Stuff happens that is often beyond your control. Bank tellers get robbed at gun point or have a cabinet fall on them. Teachers slip on wet floors or fall while breaking up a student fight. Business people get into car accidents while traveling or fall in the hotel shower.
I remember a call from a supervisor at a big Chicago area warehouse who told me that he used to hate his workers who filed for work comp, but now that he was hurt, he got it. His benefits were denied for about six weeks. During that time he was in tremendous pain and ended up being late on a mortgage payment because he didn’t have any money coming in.
Beyond the financial reasons you should care, if you are injured while working, without work comp benefits you could be facing tens of thousands of dollars in out of pocket expenses even with great insurance. But with work comp on your side, 100% of your bills are paid for and you don’t have to worry about a medical provider being in network. In other words, you don’t get punished because you were injured in a way that benefited your job. In fact, these great laws give you the best chance possible at getting all of the treatment you need and a full recovery.
Beyond all of this, if your injury is so serious that you need to change careers and suffer a wage loss, Illinois work comp laws account for that. You could be making $125,000 today, but find yourself two years from now only able to make $30,000. You don’t lose out in that situation. Even if you have no income change, you can also get compensated for how the injury will affect you later on in life.
The bottom line is that a work related injury could be life altering to you, someone you care about or a fellow human being. Someone who is legitimately hurt at work shouldn’t be made to suffer or have their life turned upside down. The Illinois Workers’ Compensation Act helps prevent that and gives workers remedies to fix it. It’s important and we all should be glad that it’s this way and not like states where injured workers get cast aside with welfare as their best resource.
