Work from Home and Workers' Compensation

Can you still claim workers' compensation benefits if you were injured while working from home? The answer may surprise you. Even though you are working from home, you are still covered by workers' compensation insurance for medical and income benefits if you are injured while acting in the course and scope of employment. This would commonly affect things like an IT worker who does repetitively strenuous keyboarding activities, but would also extend to such medical conditions as a back injury caused by lifting a box of employer files.

Here's an article that discusses the issue.

This was the subject of a court of appeals case in San Antonio a few years back:

The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) ¹ employed Edna Martinez as a caseworker. On Saturday, June 9, 2001, Martinez was working from home at her kitchen table in preparation for the next week's hearings when she got up, slipped in her kitchen, and fell. She broke her shoulder and hit her head in the fall.²

There, the question wasn't so much whether she could claim an injury that occurred at home-- it was a specific argument as to a state law affecting the work from home for state employees (all Pre-Covid of course).

Martinez requested a benefit review conference, a mediation process by which an employee may dispute coverage denials. The Texas Workers' Compensation Commission conducted the conference.³ At the conference, SORM argued that Martinez's injuries were not compensable because Martinez did not obtain permission to work at home—a violation of a DFPS policy “requiring advance approval for overtime.” Martinez responded that caseworkers like her often worked from home without prior approval. The benefit review officer's report listed two “disputed issue[s]” that remained unresolved when the conference concluded: “Did [Martinez] sustain a compensable injury on June 9, 2001?” and “Did [Martinez] sustain disability as the result of the June 9, 2001, claimed injury, and if so, for what period(s)?”

The parties proceeded to a contested case hearing. SORM reasserted its argument that Martinez violated agency policy by working from home without prior approval. This argument did not persuade the hearing officer, who ruled that Martinez was “furthering the business and affairs” of her employer when the fall occurred. But the officer also found that Martinez's injury “did not involve any instrumentality of the [e]mployer.” As a result, the officer concluded, Martinez's injury “did not arise out of nor [occur] in the course and scope of her employment” and thus Martinez “did not sustain a compensable injury.”