Woodbury Legal Blog

Getting hurt on the job is something every employee does their best to avoid. Unfortunately, accidents still happen. Whether due to negligence on the part of a co-worker, issues with machinery maintenance or a failure to communicate, work injuries can leave you in need of medical care and out of work for some time.

Thankfully, Minnesota workers' compensation insurance protects you against medical expenses due to a workplace injury. It can also compensate you for lost wages if you cannot return to work for some time. In order to connect with those benefits, you must comply with the regulations and statutes that govern those benefits. One of the most important things you can do to protect your right to workers' compensation benefits is to take timely action after your injury.

Aside from a denied claim for benefits, there are a lot of ways in which a dispute over workers' compensation benefits can emerge between an injured worker in the Twin Cities area and the employer or the employer's insurance company.

For instance, the employer may, after giving a legally required warning, terminate a worker's ongoing coverage for lost wages. In other cases, there may be an issue with respect to how much in weekly wages a worker is owed in the first place.

According to relatively recent government statistics, a little over one in five fatal workplace accidents involve construction workers. Moreover, among these construction accidents, there were four causes of accidents, dubbed the Fatal Four by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, that stand out as leading reasons for workplace fatalities at construction sites.

The Fatal Four do not include construction worker deaths related to automobile accidents, and traffic accidents could well be the most common cause of construction worker deaths.

Each year, many workers are killed while on the job, and more are in the construction industry than in any other sector of the United States economy. According to the AFL-CIO, 92 workers lost their lives in workplace accidents in Minnesota in 2016, the latest year for which figures were available. Nationwide, more than 5,100 died on the job. Of these, 991 were killed in workplace accidents while working construction jobs.

In light of such statistics and in spite of the number of workers who have been victims of fatal accidents while on the job, it is heartening to know that Minnesota ranked second overall in the nation in terms of workplace safety. This is according to a survey of workplace safety - among other - statistics compiled and analyzed by WalletHub. In analyzing the figures, the creators of the survey looked at four discrete data points and weighted them differently to accurately reflect their impact on overall safety.