A Department-sponsored bill from the Workers’ Compensation Advisory Council, SB536, will make the following changes to workers’ compensation law:
Employees suspended or terminated for misconduct or substantial fault This bill provides that an employer is not liable for temporary disability benefits during an employee’s healing period if the employee is suspended or terminated from employment due to misconduct, as defined in the unemployment insurance law, or substantial fault, as defined in the unemployment insurance law, by the employee connected with the employee’s work.
The unemployment insurance law defines “misconduct” as action or conduct evincing such willful or wanton disregard of an employer’s interests as is found in 1) deliberate violation or disregard of standards of behavior that an employer has a right to expect of his or her employees; or 2) carelessness or negligence of such degree or recurrence as to manifest culpability, wrongful intent, or evil design in disregard of the employer’s interests or to show an intentional and substantial disregard of an employer’s interests or of an employee’s duties and obligations to his or her employer.
The unemployment insurance law defines “substantial fault” as acts or omissions of an employee over which the employee exercised reasonable control that violate reasonable requirements of the employee’s employer, but not including minor infractions, inadvertent errors, or failure to perform work due to insufficient skill, ability, or equipment.
In other words, temporarily disabled employees lose their workers’ compensation benefits when they lose jobs because of misconduct or substantial fault (which by the way also cancels out their unemployment benefits). Given this two-fer, employers will have an extra incentive for discharging employees who suffer a temporary workplace injury. Not only are the employees disqualified from receiving unemployment benefits, but they also lose their workers’ compensation benefits. Given how easy it is to find substantial fault (the Commission has found mere negligence to qualify as substantial fault), workers’ compensation benefits for temporary injuries are likely to become exceptionally rare under this new provision. YIKES!
NOTE: As seen in the 21 October 2015 minutes of the advisory council meeting in which this change — Management Proposal 11 — was discussed, these concerns about the impact of this disqualification were not new. In these minutes, however, these concerns were made in regards to misconduct only. Substantial fault was not discussed.
Wisconsin Unemployment 