An injury that occurs during work hours in the home of an employee teleworking is eligible for worker’s compensation
If you injure yourself due to carelessness while working from home, you're now eligible for worker's compensation.
In September 2020, Alexandria Gentile-Patti, an Air Canada customer service agent, was working her regular shift from her home office on the second floor when she disconnected from her computer for her lunch break.
But while heading to her kitchen on the main floor, she tripped on her staircase and stumbled down before landing on her left side, injuring herself.
Note that the injury doesn't not have to be related to doing a task related to your job.
He also determined that the only reason Gentile-Patti was taking the staircase from her office to get lunch at the time was due to fact she was bound to a work schedule imposed by Air Canada.
Will this create a perverse incentive where the employer will not hire people with staircases or give them mandatory lunch breaks?
Basically, had she not been working a 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. shift with mandatory and specified health and lunch breaks, she might not have eaten when she did or even been on the second floor and needed to head downstairs to get lunch. Thus, the injury occurred during work hours at the workplace, Bouvier concluded.
“There is temporal proximity, even concomitance, between the disconnection with the employer and the fall,” the judge wrote.
So I guess if you took a lunch break out of your free will and you hurt yourself then that's too bad. But if you hurt yourself during a "mandatory" break then that's on the employer.
submitted by /u/Ratatouille2021
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