Introduction
In today’s competitive world every person works really hard pursuing a comfortable and successful lifestyle. But unfortunately, the toiling employees sometimes encounter various types of accidents at the workplace that might cause severe injuries. This usually happens because of the negligence of the employers to provide a secure environment in the work area and lack of proper training for the working employees to handle the machines or pieces of equipment.
In case you reside in Singapore and are going through such a painful situation due to the injuries that you received at the job, then it is inevitable for you to analyze the laws to understand if you are eligible for receiving work injury compensation: https://allegiance.com.sg/commercial-insurance/work-injury-compensation/
What is the Work Injury Compensation Act?
The Work Injury Compensation Act (WICA) helps the employees to seek compensation for work-related diseases or injuries, without taking any legal action. In Singapore, this WICA Act is a law that aims to guide the injured employees to make a claim from the Ministry of Manpower. This law helps in providing an ample amount of cash as compensation for meeting medical and other expenses of the injured employee, but it is possible only when the required conditions are met.
Who are eligible for making Work Injury Compensation?
As long as you are an employee working under a contract of apprenticeship or contract of service, you are 100 percentile eligible for claiming compensation under the Singapore law. It is obligatory that every employer purchase the Work Injury Compensation insurance exclusively for the benefits of employees working for him in a local or foreign land. Following are the two category employees for whom the compensation insurance needs to be purchased.
- Employees performing manual work, irrespective of salary level.
- Secondly, employees performing non-manual work and earning less than $1600 per month. However, the government has announced that this threshold will be enlarged to $2100 in the year 2020 and then increased to $2600 in the year 2021.
In case your employer has not purchased work injury compensation insurance, do not panic. Because according to the law the employer still needs to pay the compensation claim.
Following working groups are not eligible for the cover:
- Freelancers and independent contractors
- Uniformed Employees of the Singapore Government such as police force and civil defense force etc.
- Domestic employees
How does the claim process work on various types of workplace injuries?
As we all know every employee who suffered any type of workplace injury is absolutely entitled to claim compensation. But first, you need to prove that negligence of the employer is the prime cause of the injury. If your personal injuries occur during the period of your employment and while performing your assignment as an employee, then seeking work injury compensation should be a piece of cake. Other important situations employees can seek compensation are:
- Accident occurred in a foreign land where the employee has traveled for performing his or her duties.
- Accident occurred while traveling to work by the transportation provided by an employer.
- Affected by occupational sickness.
- Infected with disease due to the exposure of poisonous chemical or biological agents at the workplace.
- Dependents of a deceased employee can claim for compensation if the employee dies because of the workplace injuries
What can an employee claim?
An eligible employee can easily claim work injury compensation for:
- Loss of wages for the days issued with medical leave and being hospitalized.
- Medical expenses that cover your medication, hospital bills, and other related charges.
- Lump-sum compensation exclusively for employees who died or affected with permanent incapacity.