A company currently pays employees who are on sick leave after the third day of absence, but employees who are absent because of injury sustained in a workplace accident are paid from day 1. There is some question as to whether paying injured employees from day 1 is tantamount to admitting liability? What do members think? Phil W

Phil W - more likely perhaps that paying from day one is related to industrial injury payments?

Hi Phil. It is common in councils to have 2 forms of 'sickness absence'; the first related to sickness and the other 'industrial injury' (or accident). It has quite a long-standing and union-related origin. There is often a disparity in how the two are dealt with - down to HR of course. The problem with this is that H&S is often asked to arbitrate - "is this an industrial injury?". Whilst this might have seemed to be a clear distinction in the olden days, with more emphasis on health these days, and a wide range of potentially work-related conditions, who is to say? My take was that anything claimed to be work-related should be investigated. That investigation determines any WR component. The difficulty is that things like asthma, stress, aches & pains, tend not to be reported (for investigation) until it's too late to be able to figure out the causes. Differentiation creates anomolies, and leads to challenges by staff, determined to get onto the 'preferred' industrial injury absence list which also did not count as 'sickness absence' for performance matters. In theory, if an employee did lose pay as a result of a WR injury or health condition, and a company policy of non-payment, they could of course include this in any civil claim. It is for HR to determine these matters, and the company approach. Resist any attempt to make it YOUR problem! I have never heard of it being connected to any indication of liability.