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According to a recent news article from the Boston Globe, a Framingham construction worker was seriously injured in an on-the-job accident. The victim, who was 38-years-old at the time of his serious workplace accident, suffered severe injuries to his pelvis and his legs. Authorities said the victim was a man who was working on the construction site when a 5,000-pound front loader with a backhoe slipped down an icy hill.  The large piece of construction equipment slipped more than 15 feet down the embankment and then crashed through a retaining walling and fell another 10 feet.  When it finally came to a stop, it landed on the worker, and he was seriously injured in this workplace accident.As soon as the accident occurred, others on the job site called 911, and first responders rushed to the area.  When they arrived on scene, they called in a rescue team from the local fire department to free the man who was pinned beneath the heavy construction vehicle. The vehicle not only had to be lifted off the man quickly so he could be treated at a hospital, it had to be done in a carefully controlled manner, because any shifting of the vehicle could instantly kill the victim or, at the very least, do significantly more damage, including paralyzing him.

The fire department used a series of airbags to slowly lift the backhoe off the man in the requisite controlled manner so as not to cause any additional injury or death. When the equipment was lifted off of him, rescue workers carefully extracted him from beneath the heavy loader, and he was stabilized on the scene and then rushed to a University of Massachusetts Medical Center, which is a local level-one trauma center.  He was alert and conscious the entire time he was trapped under the loader and is expected to live, despite being severely injured in the Framingham workplace accident.

As our Boston workers’ compensation attorneys can explain, these benefits are typically the exclusive remedy in these types of cases. The reason for this is because workers’ compensation was set up so as not allow the injured workers to sue their own boss.  In exchange for making workers’ compensation the exclusive remedy, workers do not have to prove there was no negligence on behalf of the injured worker in order to collect.  It it only necessary to prove that the worker was injured on the job and is an employer within the meaning of the Workers’ Compensation Act.

This means that the worker cannot collect workers’ compensation benefits and then also sue his or her employer.  It doesn’t matter if he or she actually sues the employer, as the test is whether they are eligible to receive workers’ compensation benefits. However, if a negligent third party caused the accident, the claimant could sue that negligent third party and still file for workers’ compensation benefits. An example of this might be when a worker is hit by a piece of construction equipment.   If that equipment was being operated by an employee of a different contractor, this would make that employee a third party.


Construction worker seriously injured in Framingham, January 11, 2017, By Reenat Sinay, Boston Globe
