Unmasking Claim Suppression and the Crisis Facing Migrant Workers

Introduction

Workplace injury is a harsh reality, but the system designed to support injured workers – like the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) in Ontario – is failing its most vulnerable clients. At the Advocates for Injured Workers (AIW) legal clinic, we provide free legal aid to low-income clients suffering from serious workplace injuries. Our casework reveals a startling prevalence of claim suppression. This isn’t just a technical glitch; it is a systemic tactic used by some employers and often reinforced by the WSIB and healthcare providers. Vulnerable workers, especially migrant labourers, are discouraged from reporting workplace accidents and injuries.

What is Claim Suppression?

Claim suppression occurs when an employer intends to hinder an injured worker from properly reporting a workplace injury or illness to the workers’ compensation board. The goal is simple: to keep the injury “off the books” to avoid increased insurance premiums and penalties.

For the worker, this practice can have catastrophic consequences, as it denies them access to crucial medical care, return to work programs, and loss-of-earnings benefits needed to recover and rebuild their lives.

Different Methods of Claim Suppression

Based on our direct work with injured workers, claim suppression is a pervasive and persistent pattern that operates on two key levels: overt actions and subtle psychological coercion.

1.     Overt Claim Suppression

Overt tactics are direct, sometimes blatant attempts to stop a claim from being filed or processed. These actions leave little doubt about the employer’s intent:

• Direct Threats and Termination: The most aggressive form involves directly threatening employees with termination, reduced hours, or non-renewal of contracts if they attempt to file a claim. For migrant workers, this threat often entails repatriation, loss of immigration status, and not being called back next year.

• Intentional Hiding of Information: Employers may not provide workers with adequate information regarding the reporting procedures. Many migrant workers who face language barriers are not aware of the forms they need to fill out after the injury or the process of submitting the forms.

• Paying Under the Table: Some employers offer injured workers a small amount of settlement money or continued wages to prevent them from filing an official WSIB claim, creating a private settlement that is almost always far less than the worker’s true entitlement.

  
  

2.     Subtle Claim Suppression

Subtle claim suppression relies on psychological pressure and manipulation, often masked as a helpful “return-to-work” process. These forms are harder to challenge, but equally devastating to overt tactics:

• Unsuitable Modified Duties: Injured workers are often subjected to “suitable” Return-to-Work (RTW) offers that exceed their functional restrictions. Our clients, typically manual labourers with severe, permanently disabling injuries, received offers that aggravated their pain. The implicit message is: keep working (and aggravate your injury) or lose your job.

• Denying “Invisible” Injuries: Employers frequently deny responsibility for injuries that are harder to prove or less immediately visible, such as chronic back pain, mental health conditions, or gradual-onset occupational illnesses. Injuries sustained over a long period of manual labour are much harder to prove than injuries caused by a single, traumatic accident. This reality is often exploited by employers to deny chronic injuries.

• Downplaying Severity: The injury’s severity is minimized in workplace documentations with an emphasis placed on the worker being “fine” or “ready to return.” This practice creates a narrative of minimal impact that later undermines the worker’s WSIB claim for benefits.

  
  

Claim Suppression in the Context of Migrant Workers

The devastating impact of claim suppression is most acute among precariously employed migrant workers. For example, Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) brings tens of thousands of migrant workers from the Caribbean to work on Ontario farms. Once they are injured, the migrant workers are often repatriated almost immediately with little to no healthcare. After repatriation, workers are left with few resources to submit claims to the WSIB.

Their vulnerability is weaponized against them in the following ways:

• Fear of Non-Renewal: SAWP workers come to Ontario in a seasonal pattern. They come during the agricultural seasons and return home in winter. The majority of them are called back by their employers every year. However, they often refrain from reporting their injuries, fearing that their employers will not call them back next year if they have been “uncooperative”.

• Communication Barriers: Language difficulties and lack of education prevent these workers from effectively communicating their pain, understanding complex legal documents, or negotiating with employers and WSIB case workers.

• Systemic Discard: Once disabled, the workers become useless to the SAWP. They are repatriated and often become financial liabilities for their families. They are frequently unable to return to the industries they used to work in before joining the SAWP because of their permanent physical restrictions. Given the economic disparities between countries, it is often harder for them to find a job in their home countries than domestic injured workers.

Claim Suppression as a Systemic Issue

Within the context of claim suppression, a worker’s journey through the WSIB system is a profound experience of institutional denial. When a suppressed claim finally makes it through, it often faces arbitrary denial by the WSIB itself.

We regularly see claims denied by WSIB, often arbitrarily, without any proper reasoning. The onus is placed entirely on the injured worker to prove every element of their claim, often over the course of decades.

The WSIB sometimes appoints medical experts whose opinions are predictably unfavourable, effectively manufacturing evidence to deny entitlements. Migrant workers experience this practice more frequently because the WSIB always sends them to the same doctors in their home countries. Some doctors are notorious for their condescending attitudes and unfavourable diagnoses. This turns the very process meant to provide expert care into a bureaucratic apparatus designed to reinforce denial.

The result is a vicious cycle. Injured workers are forced to wait years, sometimes up to decades, to receive proper healthcare and benefits. During this protracted battle, their physical injury transforms into chronic pain, dependency on family, long-term drug dependence, and severe mental health difficulties. These secondary symptoms are difficult to prove unless workers have maintained detailed medical records. However, many workers do not have the resources and energy to do so. The workplace injury only leaves them with feelings of uselessness, hopelessness, and abandonment.

How Legal Clinics Can Help Workers Fight Claim Suppression

Legal clinics like Advocates for Injured Workers (AIW) are a crucial frontline defence against this institutionalized inequity. By providing free legal representation and navigating the complex appeals tribunals (WSIAT), clinics provide the expertise and legal voice necessary to stand up to powerful employers and the bureaucratic machinery of the WSIB. The bulk of their work is to challenge arbitrary WSIB decisions and the misuse of medical opinions by pushing back against the systemic denial that defines so many of these cases. They also ensure that the medical and narrative evidence of the worker, which is often dismissed due to language or social barriers, is properly documented and presented.

The fight against claim suppression is the fight for worker dignity and safety. It requires not just legal support, but also systemic reform to ensure that no worker, regardless of their immigration status or employment contract, is forced to choose between their health and their livelihood.

-PH