Do Injured Workers Pay for Reasonable Accommodation?

Abstract

The authors present evidence on the extent to which injured workers in Ontario in 1979–88 “paid,” through lower wages, for “reasonable accommodation” requirements designed to facilitate their return to work after their injury. The data source, the Ontario Workers#x0027; Compensation Board's Survey of Workers with Permanent Impairments, provides detailed information on two categories of accommodation: workplace modifications, such as customized equipment and shortened work schedules; and reductions in physical demands, such as exemption from bending and heavy lifting. Employers who rehired their own injured workers appear to have absorbed virtually all the cost of the accommodations they made, but employers who hired workers who were injured at other firms shifted a substantial portion of the cost of workplace modifications (though not the cost of reductions in physical demands) onto the injured workers, in the form of lower pay.