Hi. I’m Indiana and a personal injury attorney David Holub. In this video, we address the impact that a disabling injury can have on earnings capacity. People suffering from a...
Read MoreHi. I’m Indiana and a personal injury attorney David Holub. In this video, we address the impact that a disabling injury can have on earnings capacity.
People suffering from a disabling injury have a difficult time with the labor market. First, they overall lack labor market participation because there are fewer jobs available to meet their medical restrictions.
And those jobs that do meet their medical restrictions typically are lower paying jobs. So there’s a lower earning capacity.
Let me give you an example.
Suppose there’s a full-time assembly line worker making fifty dollars an hour.
Along with that fifty dollars an hour comes pension benefits, insurance benefits and, even paid vacation. So now because of an injury, the individual can only work as a clerical worker because the doctor said they must only do sedentary work. And so now they are working as a convenience store clerk making twelve dollars an hour. And at that convenience store, they have less pay, no health insurance benefits, no pension benefits, no paid vacation.
And also because of the injury, let’s say they’re forced to retire early. Let’s say the doctor says, you know, based on your injury, you should retire at age sixty and not try to tough it out ’til age seventy.
So their social security benefits are going to be less because they’re earning less over their lifetime and they’re having to retire early And when you retire early, you get a lower benefit.
Also, let’s add that the individual has no college degree.
Statistically, there are fewer sedentary jobs for people who don’t have a college degree.
So over a person’s lifetime, their earning capacity can be extremely, damaged based on a disabling injury.
And I know it’s tough to calculate but the type of factors that we’ve discussed would go into that calculation and as attorneys, it’s our job to help a jury understand what has been lost by our client and we make these, sales pitches to juries all the time.
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