Off The Record – Workers’ Comp – Concurrent Employment

Video Transcript

Hi. Bill Turley here from Turley Redmond & Rosasco. Today, I’m going to talk to you about something called concurrent employment and how it impacts on your workers’ compensation claim. So when you have an on-the-job injury and you lose time from work, you’re entitled to a lost wage benefit or what they call indemnity benefits. And that benefit is typically two-thirds of your average weekly salary, and that average weekly salary is the salary that you earned with the job you were on at the time you got hurt. But what many workers don’t realize is that you can also take into account wages from another job that you have. So let’s say you have a full-time job at Home Depot and you also do another part-time job at Lowe’s, you can include the earnings from both of those jobs to calculate your average weekly salary, and in turn, your benefit rate.

So let’s say for example that you made $600 a week at Home Depot and then you made another $300 a week at Lowe’s, you would combine those two salaries and your benefit rate would be $600. But if you stuck with just the one set of earnings from Home Depot, you’d only be entitled to $400 a week. So you should keep in mind that you’re entitled to take into account all of the jobs that you had at the time of your accident. But there’s a couple of exceptions here, it has to be a job that would normally be covered under the New York State Workers’ Compensation system.

So if one of your additional jobs is with the federal government, let’s say with the veteran’s hospital or the United States Postal Service or with the IRS, for example, you can’t use that income to calculate your benefit rate because it’s a not-covered employment. The magic words here are covered employment, the employment has to be covered employment. The other thing too is that if it’s something that you work at off the books for cash, which you shouldn’t be doing anyway, but you can’t include that income either. You have to show that it’s something that you would normally be covered for into workers’ compensation. Also, if you’re an independent contractor and you’re not covered for workers’ compensation on that job, that would be another situation.

So the way you go about this is when you file your claim, you can indicate on the claim form that you do have additional employment. And all you really need to do is produce your pay stubs that show that you were working at that job around the time of the accident. And it’s also good to get a letter from that employer indicating that you were employed at the time of the accident. And also including your job title, your date of hire, your rate of pay, the normal hours that you work. Also, if you were at that job for the prior year, it’s good to have the W-2 also to document your earnings. This is one of many, many issues that you have to deal with in the workers’ compensation system, and we’d be more than happy to assist you with this and the multitude of issues that come up. So just give us a call at 631-582-3700 or visit us on the website, www.nydisabilitylaw.com. This is Bill Turley, and thank you for listening.