Bullying, harassment and intimidation in the workplace causing spike in workers’ compensation claims

Workers’ compensation claims have risen for the first time in years despite people working from home more than ever before, with blue- and white-collar workers in the firing line of bullying, harassment and intimidation in the workplace.

Queensland work compensation claims have increased during Covid-19 with experts blaming the workloads of frontline workers and the pandemic stealing the focus of health and safety standards for the spike.

Under the Queensland workers’ compensation scheme, workers made 94,502 statutory claim lodgements for 2020-21, up from 90,064 in the financial year prior, and 3,232 common law (negligence) claims, up from 3,001 over the same period.

The annual WorkCover report showed accepted statutory claims rose to 65,408 in 2021, up from 62,639 in 2020.

Compensation lawyer firm Travis Schultz and Partners special counsel Trent Johnson said his team had seen a rise in inquiries from blue collar workers, first responders reporting psychiatric injuries and injuries from assaults and restraints, and white collar workers suffering psychiatric injuries due to bullying, harassment and intimidation in the workplace.

“It begs the question – have Queensland employers been too concerned about resourcing Covid-19 protocols such as social distancing, sanitiser and face masks to be worried about maintaining and improving existing safety standards in the workplace?” Mr Johnson said.

“Has the distraction of a pandemic wound back the clock and meant that workers in Queensland are now more exposed than prior to Covid-19 to suffering potentially life-changing injury in their workplaces?”

Psychiatric injuries have been one of the contributing factors in the rise.

The health care and social assistance industry accounted for the largest proportion of claim lodgements in 2020-2021 with 16.9 per cent of all scheme lodgements.

It was also the industry with the largest claim increase, up 13 per cent to 15,924 claims.

Mr Johnson believed it could be due to the burden of Covid-19 on the health care system.

“I think we’re seeing a spike in health worker claims because they still have a much higher workload than they did pre-Covid because we’ve got lots of sick people in hospital and elective surgeries delayed,” he said.

“Health care workers are also a finite resource so if we have a number of nurses, doctors and allied health practitioners off work than the others have to pick up the slack and perform overtime et cetera.

“Inevitably, even with all the best practises in the world, at some stage they’re probably going to get sick and if they do come down with an illness as a healthcare worker and they have been exposed to it at work- for example in an isolation wad- of course they’re entitled to put in a workers compensation claim if there is a link.”

Mr Johnson expects the vast majority of those claims would come through as statutory claims rather than negligence claims.

A Queensland workers’ compensation scheme pocketbook analysing the data stated many factors influence the number of claims lodged and the overall claim rate in the Queensland workers’ compensation scheme.

The scheme cited some factors as injury prevention initiatives and interventions by Workplace Health and Safety Queensland and WorkCover Queensland, the changing industrial/services mix of the Queensland economy, variations in the overall numbers of workers in the workforce, work process changes within industry, other external factors affecting economic activity such as pandemic-related health orders.

A spokesman for the Office of Industrial Relations said employers had the primary duty of care to ensure the health and safety of workers, including when allowing them to work from their home.

Workers also have a personal obligation to take care of their own health and safety and follow health and safety policies, procedures and instructions put in place by their employer.

“Injuries sustained while working from home are compensable if the injury arises out of or in the course of your employment, and the employment was a significant contributing factor to the injury,” the spokesman said.

“While working from home arrangements have become more common over the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise in workers’ compensation claims over the period 2019-20 to 2020-21 is multifaceted.

“The number of claims incurred in any one year is sensitive to factors such as economic conditions, the size of the labour force, employer’s work health safety and injury management performance, and behavioural changes from claimants and the medical profession.

“With respect to the increases in relation to claims from the health care and social assistance industry, while the COVID-19 pandemic has likely increased the demand on healthcare workers, it is noted that this increase in claims is part of a broader trend.”

Mr Johnson said in previous years, employers have heavily focused on maintaining workplace health and safety standards which have improved the safety of workplaces and led to a downturn in work related injuries.

Covid-19’s impact on work-from-home arrangements, employers’ resources and increased work loads shook things up.

Mr Johnson believes employers and employees have grown resilient through the pandemic and expects WorkCover claims will return to pre-pandemic rates this year.