Light Duty Status after a Work Injury

TRANSCRIPT: If at some point during your recovery from a work injury, the doctor states, Mr. Smith or Mrs. Smith, you're eligible to go back to light-duty status, with restricted lifting, bending, squatting, such as those type of restrictions, but those restrictions don't meet the qualifications of your full-duty job. Then the obligation switches to your employer. They have the right to try to find a position within the company that adheres to your doctor's restrictions. Or if they can't, and you continue to be off of work and receive your off-work benefit pay, which is your TTD benefit pay, which as we discussed earlier, is 67 percent or two-thirds of your gross pay per week. Now there is exceptions to this rule. Let's state that your job says okay, we can accommodate these light-duty restrictions, but instead of coming back 40 hours a week, which was your normal work week, we can only accommodate you at 20 hours a week. So you're losing 20 hours of pay. In this case, you're protected. You get a benefit which is called TPD. And what that means is that if you're reduced, meaning the amount of money that you are receiving is less than before because of restricted hours, or because of less pay because of a new position, you get two-thirds of the difference of that pay. And what I mean by that is to break it down to mathematics is let's say you had gross pay per week of $600 a week before you were injured. And let's say while you're off of work and you're recovering and they have you back to light duty at 20 hours a week, instead of making $600 a week, you're now making $300 a week. That's a $300 difference between your gross pay before and your gross pay afterwards. The law states that you're entitled to two-thirds of that difference in pay. So if you're losing $300 because they reduced your hours, two-thirds of that pay would be $200. So you get your $300 for working 20 hours a week, and you'd get an additional $200 from workers' compensation for the differential in pay that you are losing because you are on restricted duty and/or restricted hours.