Texas is the only state that doesn't require most private employers to carry workers' compensation. Attorney Jason Itkin explains what that means for plant and refinery workers, and where their rights hold up.
If your employer carries workers’ compensation, it is your exclusive remedy against them. You cannot sue your employer for the injury, no matter how preventable it was. In exchange you get medical care and income benefits, which for temporary benefits means 70% of the difference between your average weekly wage and whatever you can still earn, subject to a weekly cap set by the state.
What comp does not pay for is most of what a catastrophic injury actually costs. There is no payment for pain, no payment for mental anguish, no payment for disfigurement, and nothing at all for what a company knew about a piece of equipment before it failed. Permanent damage is handled through an impairment rating, which converts a doctor’s percentage into three weeks of wage replacement per point. It is arithmetic, not a valuation of what happened to you.
“Some states have workers’ comp, which is a system that doesn’t work and doesn’t protect its workers, and in some ways makes it worse because they turn you over to bad doctors and a bad process.”
A lawsuit reaches everything comp leaves out.
Pain, mental anguish, disfigurement, the full value of a career that ended, and where the conduct was bad enough, damages meant to punish it. That is the difference between a scheduled benefit and being made whole.
The deadlines are not the same, and the mismatch can sometimes be confusing. A personal injury suit in Texas generally has to be filed within two years. The workers’ compensation system runs on much shorter clocks: report the injury to your employer within 30 days, file the claim with the Division of Workers’ Compensation within a year. A worker who assumes they are inside the comp system, and is wrong about that, can lose time on the deadline that actually applies to them.
The comp bar protects your employer. It does not protect anyone else.
Under Texas law an injured worker can collect workers’ compensation and still sue a third party whose negligence caused the injury, which at a plant usually means the manufacturer of the equipment that failed, a turnaround or maintenance contractor, or another company working on site. That is where most plant cases actually live.
Who your employer is matters here too. Most people hurt at a refinery are not on the operator’s payroll. They work for contractors and staffing firms, and those companies make their own coverage decisions. A contractor can be a non-subscriber, meaning it carries no workers’ compensation at all, while the plant it sends people into is fully covered. A non-subscriber can be sued directly for negligence and loses three defenses in the process: contributory negligence, assumption of risk, and blaming a coworker. It still has to be proven negligent though.
“Our job is to figure out who’s in the zone of responsibility and hold them accountable.”
Sorting out which companies belong in a case and which do not is investigative work that happens before anything is filed. Arnold & Itkin has done this against plant operators, equipment manufacturers, and contractors. To learn more about how our plant and refinery accident attorneys can help, we encourage you to give us a call today.
When something terrible happens at a plant, the companies responsible usually don’t do the right thing. Plant and refinery workers, unfortunately, don’t have a lot of legal protections. Some states have workers’ comp, which is a system that doesn’t work and doesn’t protect its workers, and in some ways makes it worse because they turn you over to bad doctors and a bad process.
Really, the only place that an injured worker has rights is in the courtroom. It’s the one place where a worker and a Fortune 500 company are treated equally, provided that that worker has the right lawyer, which means a lawyer that knows the law, knows the facts, has the resources to fight the plant, and has the track record of success and the expertise to win the case.
The plants and work sites have a Rolodex of big-time, high-powered lawyers that specialize in this area. And if you’re not fighting fire with fire, they’re just gonna run over you. You need someone who understands the law, who understands the nuances of the work, and who’s got the track record of winning. And we’re sitting there at the top. I mean, 20 years later, we’ve gotten the largest results in plant accidents across the country.
As your lawyer, it’s our job to make sure that we sue the people who are responsible and don’t sue people who aren’t responsible, because we’re not trying to drag people through lawsuits that don’t belong in them. But we’re also not trying to give anybody a free pass if they did something to hurt you or kill a loved one. And so our job is to figure out who’s in the zone of responsibility and hold them accountable.
Call us, email us, text us. We’ll respond and hold the people who did it accountable and make sure that your family’s taken care of.
