Woodbury Legal Blog

Many workers in the greater Twin Cities area may have attended a recent holiday party, or just an end-of-the-year event, in recent days. While hopefully everyone managed to stay safe at these events, there is always a chance an employee can get injured at a social event like the annual holiday party. Of course, this applies to other company outings that take place at other times of the year as well.

While one might not realize it, workers' compensation benefits could be available to an employee who gets hurt at an employer-sponsored office event. The reason is that benefits cover not only accidents that happen while on the company's premises and while employees are actively performing their job functions but also at just about any work-related activity.

Workers in different fields and types of workplaces may suffer from blows to the head while on the job, whether on the assembly line at a plant or the records room in an office park. Even if the incident does not initially seem very serious, it is important for any worker who receives a blow to the head to seek professional medical care as soon as they can. Even minor head injuries can result in harm to the brain, which may cause symptoms that significantly change the way that a victim processes information and communicates with others.

A minor brain injury is often much more dangerous than victims realize. This is because its effects are not always easily identifiable. If the victim never receives medical care after the accident, they may forget about the incident entirely and never make the connection between their symptoms and the injury. If the symptoms weren't so destructive, this may not be a major concern, but the symptoms are often very destructive to both the victim and those around them. In some cases, workers who suffer head injuries may destroy their professional and personal relationships before they realize they have a serious injury at all.

Although its leadership has been implicated in a worker trafficking scheme, a company that handled subcontracting work for home projects in the area seems to continue to enjoy the favor of the Twin Cities area's largest home-builder. It recently came to light that this home-builder was affiliated with the impugned company, a company whose owner was recently arrested and accused of labor trafficking. For those who are unaware, labor trafficking can refer to the practice of using undocumented immigrant labor for construction projects, and then using their status as a threat to keep them from demanding their rights as workers.

For its part, the homebuilder dodged responsibility, saying that the company in question was actually retained by one of the homebuilder's subcontractors, meaning, in effect, that the company is simply too far down the chain of responsibility for the homebuilder to be blamed.

A recent post on this blog talked about temporary total disability benefits, or TTD, which are the type of benefits an injured Minnesota worker gets when he or she is hurt on the job and needs to take a few weeks or months off to recover. While arguable, TTD is perhaps the easiest benefit to understand.

Another benefit workers commonly get awarded during the workers' compensation process is permanent partial disability, or PPD. Unlike TTD, workers do not get this benefit at the time of their injury.