Personal injury attorneys represent individuals who suffer from negligence on the hands of another person or company. In the case of car accidents, a person who has been drinking and driving, has been distracted, or has been driving aggressively can be sued for negligence and forced to pay all the costs of the injuries.
Personal injury attorneys also represent individuals who suffer from slip and fall accidents. There are many slip and fall statistics out there as well as statistics about how often workplace injuries happen and whether an employer can be accused of wage theft, when wages are withheld due to an accident that could have been prevented.
These statistics include:
- The median number of days away from work due to occupational injuries was eight days in 2015, one day fewer than 2014.
- The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that there were 1,153,490 missed days of work due to occupational injuries in the private sector, state government, and local government, virtually unchanged from 2014.
- In 2015, the three deadliest occupational injuries were transportation incidents; falls, slips, and trips; and contact with objects and equipment. Roadway accidents accounted for about one out of four fatal work injuries.
And there are statistics surrounding fatal work-related accidents, which are often caused by road way accidents, such as transportation incidents, and falls that result in contact with objects and equipment. These statistics are possibly negligence on the part of the employer if safety measures haven’t been enacted.
An employer may be negligent when it comes to workplace injuries when it comes to many reasons. First, an employer, if the job has hazards, often gives the employee safety training to handle the safety issues that the job brings to the table. The employee safety training might run the gamut of physical safety guidelines (how to lift things) or others.
An employer may also instruct the person how to handle dangerous and deadly objects, such as chemicals if the person is working in a laboratory. If a person is handling dangerous machinery, they will likely be prepped on how to handle that machinery in a safe manner as to avoid an injury.
An employer might instruct employees to wear certain types of clothing or material to prevent a workplace injury. For food service employees, non stick shoes are usually required so as to prevent slips and falls on floors that are covered in some kind of slippery material.
An employer might also have individuals who deal with chemicals to have some sort of material on them that adheres to the body and keeps the person’s body protected from the material that is harmful. This may include an apron that is poison resistant or a vest that retards fire.
For an employee who has suffered a workplace accident that could have been prevented if the company that employed the worker had instructed them to use safety techniques and guidelines, there may be a possibility that the worker will suffer damages in the form of physical, financial, and mental losses.
The physical, financial, and mental losses may be cause to file a lawsuit. This lawsuit would be for worker’s compensation as the result of a negligent employer causing a workplace incident. There are many statistics surrounding this and wage theft. Those statistics are:
- Workers suffering minimum wage violations are underpaid an average of $64 per week.
- According to a 2015 ProPublica report, despite complaints from business owners, employers were actually paying the lowest rates for workers’ compensation insurance in the past 25 years, even as the health care costs rose.
- According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, there were almost 90,000 workplace discrimination and termination charges filed in the U.S. in 2015. Of those cases, wrongful discharge due to retaliation was the most common (44.5%), followed by discrimination due to race (34.7%), disability (30.2%), gender (29.5%), and age (22.5%).
There are several legal terms that apply to these kinds of legal issues. They include workers rights, wrongful termination, grievance and interest arbitration, equal opportunity laws, wage theft, civil rights violations, injured in an accident, and much more.
Wage theft is a difficult scenario when an individual gets their wages stolen by the employer, resulting in difficult for that individual. That individual can hire a lawyer to sue for that stolen money.