Recent immigrants over-represented, says report
Precariously employed workers who suffer perceived unfair treatment during the injury claims process often exhibit five different responses, according to a report from researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.
“Precariously employed workers are vulnerable to unfair treatment and studies have shown that recent immigrants are over-represented in precarious employment,” said Ellen MacEachen, director of the School of Public Health Sciences and co-author of the study.
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Workers may be treated unfairly by employers, compensation boards and return-to-work coordinators, according to the report. And workers went through all or most of these five stages – not always linearly – when faced with procedural unfairness: (1) passive, (2) fought back, (3) quit pursuit of claim, (4) quit job, and (5) won or got further in the fight, based on findings from interview with 36 precariously employed injured workers in Ontario.
Feeling confused, angry, frustrated, unsupported, disappointed, determined, optimistic,and wary were common emotions, according to researchers. By knowing these responses may be helpful for safety officers to improve the process, they said.
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“By considering emotions and behaviours, parties involved in helping injured workers can better understand how they experience RTW processes. RTW specialists, for example, could be more aware that workers may initially be passive when experiencing what they perceive to be procedural unfairness. Being aware that this passive behaviour exists may prompt them to ask better questions about how an injured worker feels about their situation, which may, in turn, prevent workers’ further perceptions of unfairness.”
Recognizing this pattern of emotions could help physicians to provide workers with appropriate support and resources, they said. Also, by knowing that workers may respond to unfairness in certain ways, policymakers may design policies to better address procedural unfairness in a workers’ compensation system.
