As this blog has explained before, injured workers in the greater Twin Cities area will ordinarily be able to get help through Minnesota’s workers’ compensation system. Primarily, these benefits cover medical expenses and lost wages following an accident.
Coverage for lost wages, which within the workers’ compensation system is referred to as disability, is divided in two ways. For one, a worker can be either partially disabled or totally disabled. The disability can also be either temporary or permanent.
Temporary total disability is perhaps the easiest of these benefits to understand. A worker will receive when he or she is unable to work at all due to a workplace illness or accident. In other words, these types of benefits are, in the purest sense, benefits paid to allow an employee to stay off work in order to recover.
These benefits are paid on a weekly basis and will usually constitute two-thirds of an employee’s weekly wage, although that is subject to statutory caps. Temporary total disability can be paid for up to 130 weeks, which is, roughly, 30 months or two and a half years.
They can end early should employee return to work or under other circumstances which, under the law, are treated the same as if the employee returned to work.
Like all types of disability benefits, it can be difficult for someone who is not intimately familiar with the workers’ compensation system to understand all the details and complexities of temporary total disability, and this information only serves as an overview. Detailed questions should be directed to an experienced Minnesota workers’ compensation attorney.