I talk to multiple injured Illinois workers every day for free. A lot of them are understandably stressed. Getting hurt at work can be a life changing event if the injury is serious or if the insurance company or your job is treating you like garbage.
One recent caller was more stressed than most and he wasn’t even hurt from the job. He’s got a good lineman job that he’s done for a long time. It sounds like he’s pretty good at his job as he’s been with the same company for a while and won a bunch of awards.
He has a new boss who sounds like a total asshole. There’s a warehouse next to the area where he works where a lot of heavy materials are stored. It’s not ventilated. When the boss is in a bad mood or mad at someone, he’ll have them and others go to this warehouse and move around a lot of heavy materials. Nobody has been trained on it, there isn’t safety equipment and it’s dangerous work.
This guy is super stressed. He told me the day after he does this work, which lasts hours, his body feels like it’s been hit by a truck. He also said that workers in this position don’t get their breaks. He wanted to know how we could help.
I told him the truth which is right now a work comp lawyer can’t do anything. We can’t bring a case due to worry about getting hurt. We can’t bring a case for him feeling worn down after doing this work unless he goes to a doctor and the doctor diagnoses an injury related to the job.
What he can do is file a complaint with the Illinois Department of Labor over the breaks and with OSHA (hopefully it still exists by the time you read this) which is the Federal agency in charge of making sure workplaces are safe.
If he does get injured and gets medical care, that’s when we can step in. At that point we can address safety issues and do things to protect him. So we told him that hopefully he stays healthy, but if he or anyone else there gets legitimately injured to get back in touch with us.
And this is the reality of Illinois workers comp law. You can’t bring a case based on something that could have happened. You bring a claim based on what actually does happen.
I once had a caller looking for help because a scaffold collapsed and had they not jumped out of the way they likely would have been killed. They could have brought a case for PTSD if they sustained a psychological injury and got treatment for that. They didn’t, but were insistent that they should have a case because they almost died. Unfortunately that’s not how Illinois law works.
And while telling someone we can’t help yet sucks and often feels grim, one thing you will always get from us is straight, direct answers. We’ll never tell you what the law should be, just what it is.
