Walmart Texas Associate Work Accident Injury Procedures and Claims
The Walmart work injury plan, that applies to Texas Walmart associates who are injured at work, contains definitions for covered injuries and related terms. The plan will pay certain amounts for an “injury,” which Walmart defines as meaning damage or harm to the physical structure of the body (or mental or emotional state with respect to a traumatic event) resulting either from an accident, occupational disease, or cumulative trauma. An accident, according to Walmart, is an event which involves factors external to the employee/associate that was unexpected, unplanned, and occurred at a specifically-identifiable time and place. Walmart provides as examples of an accident a robbery or a needle stick puncture.
Walmart indicates that, for purposes of its Texas work injury plan, occupational disease means a condition that is marked by a pronounced deviation from your normal healthy state arising out of your assigned duties working in the normal course and scope of your employment, and which causes harm or damage to your physical body structure. Occupational disease does not include diseases which are ordinary to a person’s life and to which the general public is exposed outside of work.
Cumulative trauma means damage to your body which occurs as a result of repetitious, rapid, physically traumatic activities occurring in the course and scope of your Walmart employment. Cumulative trauma does not mean soreness or general aches and pain, or fatigue, that could have been aggravated or caused by your work in the course and scope of your employment for Walmart in Texas. If you report an injury before you’ve completed at least 180 days of continuous active employment with Walmart, Walmart’s injury plan will assume that the injury is not cumulative trauma and therefore could deny plan benefits to you.
Walmart provides a number of non-covered injuries. For example, any damage, degeneration, strain, or disease or condition of the eye or your musculoskeletal structure or other body part resulting from a number of things, including the natural results of aging or poor or inappropriate posture. Walmart also does not, for purposes of its injury plan, consider an injury to be inclusive of chronic fatigue syndrome and/or fibromyalgia. Walmart also excludes job stress, heart attack, stroke, and hernia from its definition of injury, unless the hernia, for example, appeared suddenly or immediately following an injury and was accompanied by pain. Walmart also excludes from its work injury plan coverage any preexisting condition except to the limited extent that any of its approved physicians clearly confirms a significant and identifiable aggravation of such a preexisting condition.
Texas law allows an injured worker, if that worker’s employer does not have worker’s compensation coverage, to recover potentially for a number of categories of damages. In order to recover for damages, the work injury must have caused the damages. Texas law does provide that, even if, for example, a person has a back issue, and a work accident significantly aggravates that back issue, that the employee can recover for such aggravation of preexisting injury.
Workers in Texas can also potentially recover for loss of earning capacity, pain, and suffering, and mental anguish, things which are not usually allowed recovery under a typical non-subscriber work injury plan in Texas. Usually, for an employee to recover such damages, he will need to retain a work injury lawyer to file an arbitration proceeding, if a work injury plan such as Walmart’s work injury plan requires it, or file suit, if no such arbitration agreement exists. Our law firm has significant experience, both in litigation and arbitration of work injury claims. It is important if you choose to retain a work injury attorney, that you find an attorney who is familiar with arbitration.
Dean Malone
Dean Malone