Wage hike hurts injured workers, advocates say
Some deemed capable of finding new jobs see benefits reduced as minimum wage rises
At 62, Anna Maria Grillo hoped decades spent working in sewing factories would afford her some modest comforts: family time in her longtime Maple home, spoiling her grandchildren with a present or two, and the occasional trip to Swiss Chalet.
Instead, she says, a workplace injury — and a practice at the workers’ compensation board known as “deeming” — has forced her to sell her house and move near Alliston to save money.
“It means not being able to purchase a sweater or a pair of pants, not being able to purchase gifts for my daughters, for my grandchildren,” she said.
For more than a million low-wage workers, Ontario’s minimum wage hike brings the promise of more money in the bank. But for some injured workers with permanent disabilities, advocates say, it promises precisely the opposite.
Aidan Macdonald, of the Toronto-based legal clinic Injured Workers’ Consultants, says the wage bump to $14 from $11.60 an hour introduced this month brings fresh urgency to a long-standing debate over deeming at the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board. It’s a practice Macdonald calls the “biggest issue in terms of forcing people into poverty.”
Deeming works like this: when an employee sustains a permanent injury, they are entitled to loss-of-earnings benefits to make up for the wages they earned before getting hurt. When the WSIB “deems” the worker capable of finding
“It totally disregards employment barriers that people with disabilities face.” AIDAN MACDONALD WORKER ADVOCATE, ON WSIB POLICY
suitable, available work again — say, in a minimum-wage retail position — they get the difference between minimum wage and their pre-accident earnings.
So as the minimum wage rises, loss-ofearnings benefits for permanently injured workers will correspondingly fall. According to the WSIB, fewer than 1 per cent of the 80,000 Ontarians receiving loss-ofearnings benefits will be negatively affected by the wage hike — about 700 people. But spokesperson Christine Arnott said the board will phase in the adjustments over three years to “help ease the impact.”
“We’re here to help people return to health and return to work. While less than 1 per cent of people who receive loss-of-earnings benefits will see their payments impacted by the change in minimum wage, we do understand the impact is meaningful to them,” Arnott said.
The more fundamental issue, Macdonald argues, is that the WSIB cuts benefits regardless of whether the injured worker has actually found a new job after an accident. By the Injured Workers’ Consultants estimation, almost 82,000 people since 2007 have been “deemed” to have jobs without actually being employed.
“The board knows that in many cases these people are not in fact working. As long as they have deemed people capable of working, they will cut their benefits,” Macdonald said.
“It totally disregards employment barriers that people with disabilities face.”
Grillo permanently injured her wrists working in a sewing factory five years ago. Despite being deemed employable in a minimum-wage job by the WSIB, Grillo has never found work since the injury, which left her wearing wrist braces and unable to sew. With the minimum wage rising to $14 this month, she says her $66 weekly benefit will soon disappear because she was making $13 an hour at the time of her accident.
“I have applied a lot of places. When I show up and they see the braces on my wrists, they tell me we’ll let you know,” she told the Star.
“I feel depressed, I feel bad. Because I did everything they told me to do, I did everything I’m supposed to do, I did everything I could. Every time I go and apply, the answer is always the same. ‘We’ll let you know.’ ”
About 92 per cent of injured employees return to work with no wage loss within one year of their accident, according to WSIB statistics.
Employers generally have a duty to provide work for injured employees for at least a year. But as previously reported by the Star, the WSIB doesn’t track what happens to in- jured workers beyond a year back on the job.
A 2015 study conducted by professors at McMaster and Trent universities looking at injured workers with permanent impairments in Ontario found that 46 per cent were living on the poverty line five years after their accident.
That, Macdonald notes, means the cost of workplace injuries is often ultimately borne by taxpayers — rather than the employer-funded workers’ compensation system.
“I would say that almost everybody that comes into our office is already on some form of social assistance,” he said.
In a statement, provincial Labour Minister Kevin Flynn said the WSIB, an arm’s-length body, has the legal authority to determine its own practices and procedures. But he said his government was “prepared to ex- plore further action when it comes to (deeming).”
“I have met, and will continue to meet, with injured workers regarding this issue and the best way it can be dealt with.
“Our government believes in helping the most vulnerable, which is why we are raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour effective Jan. 1, 2019,” he said, adding it has also launched new employment strategy to connect injured workers and people with disabilities to jobs. The WSIB runs numerous programs designed to improve job prospects for workers who can’t return to their original role after an accident. These include skills upgrading, essential skills and literacy skills programs, which the board says results in 88 per cent of participants finding new employment.
Grillo, who grew up in Italy, says the board paid for classes to improve her language skills.
“Since I didn’t really know how to read or write English, it did help me to learn and write,” Grillo told the Star through a translator.
“But it didn’t help me prepare for another job or my job, or prepare me in any way to be able to find another job.”
Through a freedom of information request, the Star obtained audits of work reintegration programs conducted between 2014 and 2016. According to the documents, while 44 per cent of injured workers who speak English as a second language were classified as “employable,” just 13 per cent actually landed jobs after completing a board-sponsored work transition program. (These figures translated to a 23-per-cent “employment rate,” according to the review.)
In response to questions from the Star, the WSIB said it expanded its work transition program in early 2017 to include a “heavier focus on English as a second language courses.”
Despite the slower phase-in, Macdonald said, the board should ultimately do away with deeming and “compensate people for their actual lost wages.”
“No more of this pretending that people have jobs that they don’t actually have.”
After her injury and her inability to find a new job, Grillo says, she and her retired husband count on his pension and a $500 Penningtons gift card her family gives at Christmas for bare essentials.
“I don’t do anything anymore. I don’t even go see (my daughter) in Maple because gas is too expensive,” Grillo said.
“There’s nothing left in my life.”