Oakland Legal Issues Blog

Serious workplace injuries could keep a worker in Oakland away from their job for a significant amount of time. Sometimes a person's injury causes them to have to stop working entirely. These career-ending injuries can have a significant financial impact on those who suffer from them.

Each year, the Liberty Mutual Workplace Safety Index identifies the top causes of injuries in the workplace. In 2019, the following injuries were most costly: overexertion due to outside sources; falls on the same level; being hit by an object; falls to a lower level; other exertions; motor vehicle accidents; slipping or tripping but not falling; being caught in equipment; repetitive motion injuries and being struck against an object.

Blue collar workers typically work with their hands. Whether you work in a factory or at construction sites, you are likely gripping, manipulating, lifting and turning items all day with your hands. In a sense, your hands are the most important tools you have, and you rely on their strength and dexterity to get each important job you do done right.

The experience that you have working with your hands could mean that you fill a very skilled job role, such as that of a pipefitter. Over many years of hard work, you can come to demand a very reasonable hourly wage through skilled manual labor.

No one walks out their door in the morning thinking this is the day they'll be injured at work. However, workplace injuries take place all the time. Some of these injuries are minor, requiring a little first aid, but nothing else. However, other injuries are more serious, necessitating extensive medical care and making it so that the worker must recover at home for a certain amount of time before being able to return to work. And, in some cases, a workplace injury can result in permanent disability.

It is fortunate, then, that the state of California requires most employers to carry workers' compensation insurance. This is true even if the employer has merely one employee. These benefits are meant to help workers who are injured on the job get by financially until they can return to work. Some benefits provided through workers' comp include medical care benefits, temporary disability benefits, permanent disability benefits or even death benefits.

Our clients include individuals who are injured using defective products. For years, I have been watching a company called SawStop with interest. SawStop makes a very cool table saw with technology that that stops the spinning blade in an instant when it comes into contact with human flesh. With such a design, accidents which would otherwise result in the loss of fingers or hands are avoided (https://www.sawstop.com/). Given my interest in product safety, my aspiring engineer son recently shared the following YouTube link with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdW7vhYYSdM&feature=youtu.be. The video shows two designers who are developing a safety modification to rotary hand saws. These saws can cause injury in a kick back event; in such an event, the blade of the saw can catch on what is being cut and be sent back into the user. Using a variety of technologies (e.g., gyroscopes, machine learning, etc.), their design can stop a blade's rotation quickly once a kick back event is triggered. Keep the advances coming!