Common Workplace Injuries in Long Island

Common ideas about workplace injuries usually involve some sort of catastrophic event. While people do sometimes fall off ladders or are run over by construction equipment, most injuries are caused by either repetitive stress or smaller scale accidents. They may also believe that most injuries happen in blue-collar, labor-intensive jobs, but injuries in what are generally considered “desk jobs” are just as common.

Regardless of the type of job, if a person is injured while at work, they have the right to apply for workers’ compensation benefits. A compassionate workers compensation attorney can provide an overview of common workplace injuries in Long Island and how injury claims interact with the harm you have suffered.

Types of Injuries

The type and severity of common workplace injuries in Long Island are as numerous as the types of jobs people perform. In general, workers in manual labor professions, such as construction workers, movers or landscapers are susceptible to injuries that accumulate over time. These people can suffer debilitating injuries to their knees, backs or shoulders from repeated motions and heavy lifting.

Even though these injuries cannot be said to be the result of a singular instance, they are still certainly a workplace injury for the purposes of workers’ compensation. Workplace injuries can also affect office workers who are far more likely to be injured in a one-time event.

Becoming injured due to ongoing renovations, slipping on a wet spot on the floor, or even being assaulted by a client are all one-time injuries that can result in severe limitations on a person’s ability to work. These events can result in broken bones, mental trauma, or even concussions that have a lasting impact on a person’s health.

At-Work Activities

The law does not draw distinctions between whether common workplace injuries in Long Island happened as the result of years of labor-intensive work or as a one-time accident. An employee merely needs to have been “at-work” when the accident occurred. A worker is considered “at-work” if they are performing their work duties while on the clock.

A worker must be able to prove that they were at work when the accident happened in order to collect workers’ compensation benefits. An office worker injured by a falling file cabinet while they are retrieving a file can certainly be considered at work. However, if this same person is injured while on a lunch break in the parking lot, they will have a much tougher time arguing that the injury was suffered while at work.

Workers’ Compensation Claims

In order to obtain even the lowest level of workers’ compensation benefits, a person needs to miss at least seven days of work. However, workers’ compensation insurance companies have any number of ways and reasons to deny a claim. People who have suffered common workplace injuries in Long Island and have had their claim denied should contact a workers’ compensation lawyer to see how they can help.