Heres our two cents on workers compensation: The huge changes proposed to workers’ compensation are back in Parliament’s Legislative Council in a few hours. The legislation is huge and important, and looks like it will go through in due course – but that does not mean it could not be amended to improve it. The legislation focuses on getting injured workers back to work, which is good. But fair compensation for injured workers is also important and would surely be supported even with a focus on getting people back to work? We will see when Tammy Franks MLC moves the amendment to include payment of fair compensation as an object of the Act. The other controversial proposal is having a threshold of 30% (of a whole person) impairment as determining serious injury. Below this threshold, and you don’t have common law rights to compensation and you lose WorkCover support after two years. The threshold is too high and will exclude some people, particularly in occupations requiring physical strength, from receiving fair and adequate support. And it is not clear to us why psychological injury needs to be counted separately from physical injury in assessing whether an injury meets the threshold. More broadly though, assessment based on extent of injury rather than capacity to work is fundamentally flawed. Beyond the implications in this bill for workers with particular injuries, what message does it send about how people with disability are to work and live in our community? For instance, someone in a clerical position who loses use of their legs may have a serious injury above the 30% threshold, but may be capable of working productively. Yet this Act appears to put them outside the work system and on to ongoing WorkCover support. That doesn’t value the work contributions many people with injury/disability may make, nor provide the message or incentive that workplaces need to embrace and accommodate people with those disabilities/injuries. SACOSS wants full and fair support for those who are unable to work or whose work futures are limited, but the in/ability to work is the appropriate criteria – not an assumption of that ability based on a level of injury. That said, we recognise that this aspect of the bill is unlikely to be changed at this late hour, which makes lowering the threshold doubly important. Ok, so the two cents was adjusted for CPI.
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 02:37:01 +0000
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