Mississippi Longshore Permanent Disability Schedule

The TV lawyer running ads across MS has never explained the permanent disability schedule to a single longshore worker. He has never once stood before a federal Administrative Law Judge and put a dollar number on a wrecked shoulder, a bad back, or lost hearing from a Gulf Coast shipyard job under 33 U.S.C. Section 908. The schedule itself is a mystery to him. He does not know how the impairment rating process works in the federal LHWCA system. And when the insurance carrier sends your injured worker a settlement figure based on a minimized disability rating, the TV lawyer accepts it because he has no idea what the schedule says your injury is actually worth. I do. And so will you after you read this page.

What The Mississippi Longshore Permanent Disability Schedule Actually Is

A permanent partial disability schedule sits inside the Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act at 33 U.S.C. Section 908(c). Each body part on the schedule comes with a number of weeks that Congress fixed in advance. A longshore worker who ends up with a permanent impairment of a scheduled body part gets paid by taking the impairment percentage times the schedule value for that part, with the weekly rate figured as two-thirds of the worker’s pay in an average week, the average weekly wage.

Under the Act, the schedule values run as follows, arm at 312 weeks, leg at 288 weeks, hand at 244 weeks, foot at 205 weeks, eye at 160 weeks, thumb at 75 weeks, first finger at 46 weeks, great toe at 38 weeks, second finger at 30 weeks, third finger at 25 weeks, a toe other than the great toe at 16 weeks, and fourth finger at 15 weeks. Lose hearing in both ears and the schedule pays 200 weeks. Hearing loss in one ear is 52 weeks.

A back injury, like anything else the schedule does not name, falls under unscheduled permanent partial disability in Section 908(c)(21) of the LHWCA. That section pays for the wage-earning capacity the injury actually takes from you, not a preset number of weeks.

These are not small numbers. Take a Mississippi Gulf Coast shipyard worker with strong wages and a permanent 30 percent impairment to the arm. He is owed roughly 94 weeks of compensation, paid weekly at a rate equal to two-thirds of his average weekly wage. Run the math on $1,500 per week in wages. Two-thirds is $1,000 per week, times 94 weeks, which lands at $94,000.00 in permanent disability compensation for one body part. The carrier’s strategy is to get that impairment rating as low as possible. The difference between a 20 percent rating and a 30 percent rating is tens of thousands of dollars.

Mississippi Longshore Permanent Disability Schedule: How The Carrier Fights That Rating

Every serious permanent disability claim under the MS longshore permanent disability schedule eventually becomes a battle of medical experts. The carrier retains an independent medical examiner whose impairment ratings consistently come in below the ratings assigned by treating physicians. He reads through your medical records, examines you in person, then writes up a disability rating chosen to keep the insurance company’s payout as low as the paperwork allows.

His yardstick is a book from the AMA, called Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment, the accepted rating method in LHWCA cases. But the Guides contain ranges, options, and judgment calls at every level. A physician who consistently works for carriers consistently makes those judgment calls in the direction that minimizes the rating. A physician who treats injured workers consistently documents the full extent of impairment. Put those two doctors side by side on one injured worker and their ratings often land 10 to 20 percentage points apart. Apply that gap to a scheduled body part and a shipyard paycheck, and you are looking at tens of thousands of dollars.

Most longshore claims are won or lost right there, in the fight over the disability rating. The TV lawyer who has never been in a federal LHWCA hearing does not know how to fight it. He does not know the carriers’ preferred experts. How those experts have performed on the stand is unknown to him. He does not know which questions expose the inconsistency between their ratings on carrier-retained cases versus their published academic work. I know all of that. I have cross-examined these experts. The TV lawyer never has.

Unscheduled Injuries And The Wage-Earning Capacity Calculation

Back injuries and other conditions not specifically listed in the Section 908(c) schedule are compensated under the unscheduled permanent partial disability provision. The benefit is calculated based on the difference between the worker’s pre-injury average weekly wage and his post-injury wage-earning capacity. That calculation is not straightforward. The carrier will argue that despite the back injury, the worker retains the capacity to earn wages in some category of lighter work, which reduces the benefit.

A vocational expert who testifies for the carrier will identify hypothetical jobs in the national economy that the worker could perform given his physical limitations. Whatever wages those jobs pay become your post-injury wage-earning capacity on paper. Pick low-paying jobs and the weekly benefit shrinks right along with them. The higher the identified wages, the more the carrier claims the worker can still earn and the less they have to pay.

Countering this requires your own vocational expert, a medical record that clearly documents the physical limitations the injury imposes, and a lawyer who knows how to present that evidence and cross-examine the carrier’s vocational expert at hearing. The TV lawyer has never done any of this. For a MS longshore lawyer who has, the wage-earning capacity fight is familiar ground.

Hearing Loss: The Most Undercompensated Longshore Disability In Mississippi

Gulf Coast shipyards are among the loudest industrial environments in MS. Grinding, welding, blasting, and the operation of heavy equipment in enclosed shipyard spaces produces noise levels that exceed safe exposure limits daily. Workers who spend years in that environment develop noise-induced hearing loss that is permanent and progressive. Hearing loss is a scheduled condition worth 200 weeks for both ears under the Act, but it is also one of the claims most commonly buried inside a larger cumulative trauma picture — a welder who develops both spinal damage and hearing loss has two separate compensable conditions running simultaneously.

Under the LHWCA, occupational hearing loss is a compensable condition. Losing hearing in both ears puts 200 weeks on the schedule, and losing it in just one ear puts 52 weeks there. For limitations purposes the injury date is whenever the worker first connected the hearing loss to the job, or reasonably could have made that connection. For many MS shipyard workers, that date is when an audiologist told them their hearing loss pattern was consistent with noise-induced damage.

Most Mississippi shipyard workers who lose real hearing to noise never file a claim. Deafening noise is simply the price of shipyard work, they figure. They do not know it is compensable. They do not know there is a schedule value. They do not know the statute of limitations is running from the date they first knew. That ignorance costs them tens of thousands of dollars in benefits they earned by showing up to work in a loud shipyard for decades.

Before you call anyone about your permanent disability claim, be aware the adjuster will push for a recorded statement immediately — do not give one. Get the free book at the bottom of this page first.

City-Specific Longshore Disability Resources

The federal disability schedule is the same law regardless of which MS port city your employer operates in. But the employers, the specific injury patterns, and the carriers handling claims differ by city. If you worked at a specific facility, the city-level pages below go deeper on the permanent disability fight as it plays out at your employer.

• Pascagoula Longshore Permanent Disability Schedule

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