Workers Comp Insider weblog comments on my English-only post; writes good post on treatment of back pain
Workers Comp Insider adds to the safety angle on non-English speakers in the workplace in this post:“Mandatory English at the workplace?”
However, when the safety issue with non-English-speaking workers is addressed solely as a training issue, as it is in some of the articles linked from that post, there may be a tendency to focus exclusively on bilingual, multi-cultural training, which can avoid facing the need for improved ongoing communication on the job (for which bilingualism is typically not an adequate long-term solution).
Workers Comp Insider also has this interesting post: “A new prescription for back pain”
The conclusion:
[T]he employer’s best tool for fostering an active (but not necessarily pain free) recovery [is] [m]odified duty. Once we recognize that the vast majority of back injuries resolve themselves in a few months, with little or no treatment required, the need for proactive employers to help injured employees through the process – and the pain – becomes paramount. By providing modified duty, we give injured employees a reason for getting up in the morning and a place to go. We give them meaningful tasks, which help take their minds off the pain. Above all, we help them maintain their identities as productive workers. This is by far the most effective and the least expensive approach to lower back injuries.
From the employment lawyer perspective, I have certainly seen back injury situations wind up in litigation as costly disabilty discrimination, FMLA violation, and/or workers comp retaliation claims.
There’s no easy one-size-fits-all solution; but it’s an issue to pay close attention to. While the workers comp people typically like modified duty, as it reduces workers comp liability, there are some countervailing reasons for employers to be careful about when and how it is offered.
Which is not to say the recommendation in this post is necessarily a bad one, just that all angles of a particular situation need to be carefully examined by the employer and counsel, not just the impact on workers comp liability and on the employee’s recovery.
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