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Antiwork

Is work or workers’ comp the bigger scam?

Long rant. tl;dr: WC is a scam and it's not discussed enough just how screwed up the system is. I got a back injury at work in 2020. Three years later I'm still dealing with this shitshow. Approval for appointments, procedures, surgeries, etc. can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, depending entirely on if I'm released to work or if I'm at home receiving disability (bet you can't guess which one makes them work faster). I've had countless hours of physical therapy, multiple rounds of injections, and two major surgeries with a third on the table since the other two didn't really work. I used to be a really active person, which is why I chose a job in physical labor and actually enjoyed it. Today I walk with a cane and can't even stand long enough to take a shower. I also experience severe pain…


Long rant. tl;dr: WC is a scam and it's not discussed enough just how screwed up the system is.

I got a back injury at work in 2020. Three years later I'm still dealing with this shitshow.

Approval for appointments, procedures, surgeries, etc. can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, depending entirely on if I'm released to work or if I'm at home receiving disability (bet you can't guess which one makes them work faster). I've had countless hours of physical therapy, multiple rounds of injections, and two major surgeries with a third on the table since the other two didn't really work.

I used to be a really active person, which is why I chose a job in physical labor and actually enjoyed it. Today I walk with a cane and can't even stand long enough to take a shower. I also experience severe pain in my back and radiating down my sciatic nerve into my leg when I sit upright in a chair for extended periods. This injury has completely ended all of my hobbies of hiking, photography, and long road trips around the country. I don't know if I'll ever get back to them.

I had actually been promoted to management two months before I got hurt. While I was out on disability, the title quietly got passed on to someone else. I don't blame them; the job needed to get done and I obviously wasn't there to do it, and I'm obviously still not there to do it. It just added more insult to injury when, at the time, I thought the first surgery would actually fix me and I'd be back to my old self, only to see the position I'd worked so hard for over the years was no longer available to me. Of course now it's all too clear that I will have to leave the company once the case is over. Whenever that is.

But then what do I do? I don't have a degree. I don't have any transferrable skills. My job was physical labor and I can never do that again. As I am now, I can't sit upright full-time at a desk, so it's got to be something I can do remotely from a laptop. But how can I hope to beat out all those who have degrees and years of experience? My WC attorney, who understandably doubles as a disability attorney, has already cautioned me that SSDI is very difficult when you're like me and most of your pain is nerve pain.

And all the while I'm just so mad about how the entire WC system is pro-employer and anti-employee.

If you agree to take WC, the only benefit to you is that your relevant medical care is fully paid for. Of course that's vital in the US, where my surgeries alone would have put me well into the six figures in debt, not factoring in dozens and dozens of appointments with doctors and specialists, hundreds of hours of PT, and non-surgical procedures. In exchange, you're at the mercy of the WC system.

If you quit your job, you basically lose your settlement and you don't get disability. So they try to drag it out and hope that you quit.

That disability pay? It's 2/3rds of your pre-injury pay (average of the 12 preceding months). You may not earn any income to supplement it, and there are no cost-of-living adjustments. My pre-injury pay averaged about $12/hr (since I only made manager wages for two months, which was still only $15 lol). I have since received raises to nearly $16/hr since the company has been doing blanket pay increases, but it doesn't matter because those raises happened after my injury. I receive a little over $300/week.

WC also has the freedom to just jerk you around. Last year my attorneys petitioned to get me a new doctor because unsurprisingly the WC doctor didn't have my best interests at heart and wanted to move on to MMI and keep me at work despite me still complaining about pain and falls. The new doctor immediately ordered total disability. I didn't receive a single disability check from WC for three months because they disagreed with the doctor, but also kept pushing back court dates. Finally on the morning of court, after pinching pennies to buy nice clothes for the judge and riding for an excruciating hour in the car to the courthouse, my attorneys and I received a call that they would start sending disability checks. I got a big backpay check, but it didn't make up for months of stress as my fiance and I watched the credit cards each get maxed out just trying to make ends meet (or, for that matter, the interest on those cards).

I could go on and on after these three years of hell and counting, but I feel like I've gone on too long already. It's just such a shit system and I wish there was more attention on every single failure of the WC system. But no, instead there's this stigma that workers just want to file a case to get some free time off and/or money. BS. No one would willingly put themselves through this.

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