The Forensic Examiner ArticlesDisability, Dysfunction, or Deception: Explaining Acquired Occupational Disability, Part Four
Social-Economic Alternatives to Remaining Productive.
For years, experts have recognized that a construct parallel to learned helplessness is the phenomenon known as learned laziness. Once deemed the welfare pigeon paradigm, learned laziness is the expectation that certain individuals and personality types will quickly abandon motivational achievement behaviors for non-conditional rewards, sometimes in the form of workers’ compensation indemnity benefits and/or Social Security Disability Insurance. With most benefits (e.g., workers’ compensation and/ or long-term disability) paying at rates of at least 66.6% of the employee’s pre-accident wages, once-productive workers soon find it difficult to risk losing benefits by returning to the unknown consequences of gainful activity, particularly in an environment that may no longer welcome them. Often employers perceive injured workers with mistrust, and too often employers treat injured employees as damaged goods, or worse, as pariahs. With perceived employer disdain following occupational injury and/or disease, the injured worker quickly searches for alternative methods of financial survival.
There is much at stake when an individual claims to be vocationally disabled following accident and/or injury. There are various ways of explaining how an individual’s disability occurred and why it might become chronic, but in all cases, regardless of the explanation, the nonproductive consequence of people being displaced from work following an accident and/or injury is very expensive to individuals, companies, and our nation’s economy in general.
The Mercer Human Resources Consulting and Marsh, Inc., 2002 Survey of Employers’ Time-Off and Disability Programs revealed that time-off and disability program costs averaged 15% of payroll in 2001. More specifically, for an employee earning $40,000 annually, companies surveyed paid $6,000 for time away from work associated with sick days, workers’ compensation costs, shortand long-term disability programs, salary continuation programs, etc. For years, socalled acquired occupational disability, an inability to work following injury or illness, has cost our economy billions of dollars each year ($170.9 billion, according to one 2002 estimate), and yet little attention has been given to the concept of how individuals explain vocational disability.