When Training For A New Job Is As Much Work As The Job You Held Before Your Injury

As the most honest retirement planners will tell you, most of retirement planning is wishful thinking. If you sustain a work injury decades into your professional life, your ability to work can be limited sooner and more severely than you anticipated. Looking for a new job isn’t easy even under the best of circumstances, but it is even harder when you are over 50 with physical limitations. Age discrimination is real, even though it is illegal, and you may find yourself having to build a whole new set of job skills. Your employer’s workers’ compensation insurance is required to pay for career counseling and training for a new job if your employer cannot assign you to a lighter duty job within the same organization. Of course, getting your employer to pay for their obligations, or to admit that your ability to work is as limited as it is, is not always easy. If your work injuries are severe enough that you can no longer work in your previous job, contact a Chicago workers’ compensation lawyer.

Craig and the Endless Job Search

As a young man, Craig worked as a truck driver, but he eventually let his commercial driver’s license (CDL) lapse when he found steady employment in construction. At age 56, Craig was working at a construction site; he was pushing a wheelbarrow over a plank, when the wheelbarrow tipped over, causing Craig a severe knee injury. The ensuing arthroscopies, physical therapy, and cortisone injections were just the beginning of Craig’s troubles.

The two doctors who evaluated Craig’s knee disagreed over whether he needed a partial knee replacement; he eventually had the surgery more than three years after the accident. The biggest struggle Craig faced was in finding suitable work after the accident. A vocational counselor encouraged Craig to get his graduation equivalency diploma (GED) and to renew his CDL. The trouble was that, even after his knee surgery, Craig could not drive for more than an hour at a time without pain, which limited the driving jobs he could get. Over the course of a year, Craig sent out more than 40 applications, and the vocational counselor sent out about the same number of applications on his behalf, but no one hired him. Craig testified that, at his age, and with his limited ability to perform the jobs for which he was qualified, it was very difficult to find a job. The court ruled that Craig should continue to receive temporary total disability payments.

Contact a Workers’ Compensation Lawyer About Late in Life Work Injuries

No matter how old you were at the time of your work accident, you have the right to file a workers’ compensation claim. A workers’ compensation lawyer can help you exercise your legal rights if you got injured at work when you were close to retirement age. Contact Connolly Injury Law in Chicago, Illinois or call or text (312)780-0816.

Resource:

scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=2779636509992857704&q=judge+of+compensation+claims&hl=en&as_sdt=4,14&as_ylo=2012&as_yhi=2022