workers compensation

Workers Compensation is essentially a form of insurance that provides wage replacement and medical coverage to employees that are injured while working. This compensation, however, is not freely given to the employees. It is instead exchanged for the employee’s right to sue his or her employer for the tort of negligence. Depending on jurisdiction, Workers Compensation can function as various types of insurance. Wages that is lost while recovering from an injury can be paid to the employee as if they were capable of working, thus functioning as a form of disability insurance. Workers Compensation can also effectively function as health insurance as well as life insurance by paying for the injured employee’s medical expenses and paying benefits to the dependents of employees killed while working, respectively. While Workers Compensation and those that work in that specialized field can be a wonderful financial asset to injured employees and their families, such benefits and professionals that work in this field were born out of necessity due to the negligence of employers towards their employees. While it is debatable when exactly the first Workers Compensation laws were passed, Maryland was the first state to pass a statewide Workers Compensation law in 1902 with the establishment of the Employer and Employee Cooperative Fund ("Maryland state workers'," 2013). A few years later in 1906, the first federal workers compensation law was passed; the Federal Employers’ Liability Act (FELA) ("What is the," 2013). FELA is designed to compensate railroad workers that have been injured while working, but it does not operate the same as current workers compensation laws. Under FELA, the injured railroad worker must prove that injuries sustained while working are the fault of the railroad company; being unable to prove the railroad company’s fault in the incident results in no benefits being paid to the injured party. By 1949, all of the states in the United States