Workplace violence is not limited to dangerous professions. Retail clerks, healthcare staff, delivery drivers, bank tellers, home-care workers, and restaurant employees may face threats or assaults from customers, clients, coworkers, or strangers. When an employee is hurt, workers’ compensation questions often follow. Here is a plain-English look at how these claims are typically handled and […]

When temperatures climb, outdoor and indoor workers in hot environments face a real risk of heat-related illness. Construction crews, landscapers, farm workers, warehouse employees, delivery drivers, and kitchen staff can all be affected. For employers, understanding how workers’ compensation typically treats these conditions, and what can be done to prevent them, is an important part

Most workplace injuries involve only the employee and the employer. But sometimes a third party is responsible: a driver who rear-ends a delivery van, a manufacturer of a defective machine, or a contractor whose negligence leaves a hazard on a job site. In those cases, workers’ compensation may pay benefits first, while another party may

Workers’ comp was built around the idea of a single workplace the employer controls — a factory floor, a store, an office. Remote and hybrid work scrambles that assumption, because an employee’s home now doubles as a jobsite the employer typically never inspects and often can’t control. That doesn’t mean remote employees fall outside workers’

Paying someone as a 1099 independent contractor instead of a W-2 employee feels like a simple paperwork choice, but workers’ comp doesn’t actually care what you called the relationship on a tax form. If a worker you’ve classified as an independent contractor gets injured on the job and a state audit or a claim determines

If you’ve ever heard another business owner say their “mod went up” or they’re “working on getting their e-mod down,” they’re talking about the experience modification factor — a single number that can swing your workers’ comp premium up or down more than almost any other factor in your control. Despite how much it affects

Most small and mid-size employers buy workers’ compensation the same way: the carrier quotes a premium based on payroll and classification, the employer pays it, and the carrier handles whatever claims come in during the policy year. When the year ends, an audit trues up the payroll, and that is the end of it. This

When an employee gets hurt at their workstation during their shift, nobody wonders whether it is a workers’ compensation matter. The harder questions come from everything that happens around the edges of the workday. The employee who twists an ankle in the parking lot. The salesperson rear-ended on the way to a client. The warehouse

Most employers picture a workers’ compensation claim as a single event. Someone slips on a wet floor, a hand gets caught in a machine, a box falls off a shelf. There is a date, a witness, and usually an incident report filled out the same day. Those are traumatic injury claims, and they are the

Nonprofit organizations run on a mix of paid staff, part-time workers, board members, and volunteers, often with the lines between those groups blurred. A volunteer coordinator may be paid for twenty hours and donate another ten. A board member may also run the annual fundraiser. Community members may show up to help at an event