Unfortunately, workplace injuries happen with some regularity in Houston. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) requires employers to report severe injuries that are work-related. Recently, OSHA released a report that showed the national data from 2015.
The OSHA data shows that employers reported nearly 10,400 severe work-related injuries during the calendar year. More than 2,600 of those workplace injuries involved some kind of amputation. Last year was the first full year of the OSHA employer reporting, which gives employers 24 hours to report any injury that results in eye loss, amputation or hospitalization.
According to government authorities, the data from 2015 doesn’t tell the whole story because they suspect that many employers are simply ignoring the reporting requirement. The Assistant Secretary of Labor, David Michaels, stated that the real number of severe workplace injuries throughout the country could be double the number reported to OSHA for 2015.
When a worker in the Houston area suffers an injury that makes them unable to work for an extended amount of time, that person should understand their options for seeking Social Security Disability (SSD) benefits. The injured worker can collect workers’ compensation as well as SSD benefits, although there may be an offset applied to the SSD benefits.
As the OSHA data shows, severe workplace accidents do happen, and they can prevent the injured victim from ever working again. In these cases, the injured worker should be fully aware of whether than can qualify for SSD benefits.
Source: The Washington Post, “Report of 10,000 severe workplace injuries might be only half the problem,” Joe Davidson, March 31, 2016