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Court: Pleading the Fifth is not enough to cut off workers’ comp

An injured immigrant worker who refused to say whether he is authorized to live and work in the U.S. will continue to receive workers’ compensation benefits even though he invoked the Fifth Amendment when asked about his immigration status. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled recently that the workers’ refusal to discuss whether he was legally… Read more

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Study: Lack of trust leads to poorer workers’ comp outcomes

Workers should be able to trust their employers while they recover from work-related injuries and illnesses. After all, workers’ compensation is a right, and it’s illegal in many states for an employer to retaliate or fire a worker for reporting a workplace injury and filing a workers’ compensation claim. Yet firing – and the fear… Read more

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Playing Around with Hazards

Identifying workplace hazards is no game, but training to recognize potential dangers could be. At least that’s the idea behind a new online tool introduced by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The agency’s Assistant Secretary David Michaels, Ph.D., M.P.H. announced the new tool at an American Society of Safety Engineers conference in Orlando,… Read more

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Sugar plant accident that killed temp worker could have been avoided

Temp jobs are a permanent part of the new normal in the U.S. economy. An increasing number of workers in Pennsylvania and other states are temporary workers, and with the increase has come new concerns about worker safety. A Pennsylvania accident recently highlighted in an article by the journalism group ProPublica shows some of the… Read more

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A brief glimpse of Social Security’s ‘double dipping’ problem

One of the arguments that many people make against the Social Security system is that the people who draw money from the program are “double dipping.” This argument alludes to the idea that some people collect disability checks from Social Security while also collecting unemployment checks. People argue that this is unfair. First of all,… Read more

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Presumptive workers’ compensation benefits are rising in the U.S.

Firefighters, police and other public workers face hazards every day on the job – but not all of them are immediately apparent. For example, firefighters have increased cancer rates, and first responders must deal with the emotional trauma of the serious situations they live through. The nature of these injuries and illnesses can create challenging… Read more

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(Not So) Normal Working Conditions

There are certain lines of work where you might expect to have a gun pointed at you, for example, law enforcement. But if you work in a retail job, chances are you aren’t expecting to be robbed at gunpoint in the normal course of a workday. If that were the case, you might not even… Read more