Today’s post comes from guest author Leonard Jernigan, from The Jernigan Law Firm.

Many decades ago, OSHA created workplace safety standards to help employees avoid injuries from dangerous working conditions. Despite these standards, each year more than 3 million workers are seriously injured or killed while on the job. Because Workers’ Compensation fails to cover all the costs of injury, some low-wage workers (who have a disproportionate rate of injury and have more hazardous occupations than other workers) are slipping below the poverty line ($24,250 for a family of four), and the financial burden of work-related injuries is shifting from those who created the unsafe work environment to the families and workers who are injured. In 2012 alone work-related injuries and deaths cost $198 billion, according to the National Safety Council.

According to a recent report by OSHA, Workers’ Compensation only covers about 21% of lost wages and medical costs, so injured workers and their private insurance policies are then forced to cover on average 63% of the injured worker’s medical bills. Taxpayers are picking up the final 16% of work-related injury costs.

The solution to this inequality is for companies to create a workplace that prevents injuries and illnesses from occurring in the first place. OSHA believes that the reason for the majority of work-related injuries and fatalities is due to a combination of the misclassification of employees as independent contractors, the rising usage of temporary workers, and workers from different companies that are forced to work together at the same jobsite despite differences in training.  About 4,500 workers are killed on the job every year according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Three million serious occupational injuries and illnesses are reported annually and OSHA suspects that this figure is only a fraction of the unreported number of injuries and fatalities on the job.

Read more about the cost of failing to protect workers here: http://1.usa.gov/1zJOFCC

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