Gulfport Longshore Permanent Disability Schedule

The TV lawyer has never explained the permanent disability schedule to a Halter Marine worker or a Port of Gulfport longshore worker. The billboard lawyer has never stood in a hearing room before a federal Administrative Law Judge and fought over what an injury like this truly deserves. A Gulfport longshore permanent disability schedule case deserves someone who has, and who won’t let the TV lawyer’s number stand. Never once in his whole career has he stood before a federal Administrative Law Judge to argue the value of a back injury, a shoulder injury, or hearing loss from years in a Gulfport shipyard under 33 U.S.C. Section 908. He does not know the schedule. How impairment ratings get assigned inside the federal LHWCA system is a mystery to him. Say the insurance company mails your injured Halter Marine worker a settlement figure built on a minimized disability rating. That TV lawyer signs off, because the Gulfport longshore permanent disability schedule is a closed book to him and he cannot tell what your injury is truly worth. I do. By the time you finish this page, you will too.

What The Gulfport Longshore Permanent Disability Schedule Means For Halter Marine And Port Of Gulfport Workers

Congress wrote a permanent partial disability schedule into the Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act, found at 33 U.S.C. Section 908(c). Every body part on the schedule carries a specific number of weeks of compensation, and that number was set by Congress. For a Gulfport longshore worker left with a lasting impairment in a scheduled body part, compensation is figured as a percentage of that schedule value, then taken times two-thirds of what the worker’s average weekly wage is.

Here are the schedule values in weeks. An arm is 312 and a leg is 288. A hand is 244 and a foot is 205. The eye is 160. Then the thumb at 75 and the first finger at 46, the great toe at 38, the second finger at 30, the third finger at 25, and the fourth finger at 15. A toe other than the great toe is 16. Hearing loss in both ears is 200 weeks. Hearing loss in a single ear is scheduled at 52 weeks.

Back and spine injuries are not on the schedule, and they are extremely common among Halter Marine production workers who spend whole careers in physically demanding jobs in confined spaces. For those injuries and any others the schedule leaves out, the LHWCA handles them under Section 908(c)(21) as unscheduled permanent partial disability. The amount of compensation tracks how much of your wage-earning capacity is really gone, and no fixed schedule figure sets it. Both types of permanent disability are fought hard by the carrier. The fight takes a different shape, yet the aim never changes, and that aim is paying you as little as they can.

Take a worker at Halter Marine or at the Port of Gulfport who earns $1,500 per week and ends up permanently impaired by 30 percent in one arm. The schedule pays roughly 94 weeks of compensation, with each week paying $1,000, which totals $94,000.00 for just one body part. Everything the carrier does comes back to one aim, which is to hold your impairment rating at 20 percent or lower. The swing between a 20 percent and 30 percent rating is worth $30,000 to $40,000 in your pocket versus theirs.

Gulfport Longshore Permanent Disability Schedule: How Local Carriers Fight That Rating

For decades, the carriers on Halter Marine and Port of Gulfport claims have been working LHWCA permanent disability cases out of the New Orleans district. They retain independent medical examiners whose ratings on carrier cases consistently come in below the ratings assigned by treating physicians. Those examiners lean on the AMA Guides, known in full as Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment. Each judgment call they make leans toward the lowest rating they can defend.

The AMA Guides contain ranges, options, and judgment calls at every level of the rating process. The difference between a physician who makes those calls in the carrier’s direction and a physician who documents the full extent of impairment is often 10 to 20 percentage points on the same injured worker. On a scheduled body part at Halter Marine wages, that difference is tens of thousands of dollars.

Winning the impairment rating fight requires knowing the carrier’s preferred examiners in the New Orleans district, knowing their history on the stand, and knowing which cross-examination questions expose the gap between their carrier-case ratings and their published academic positions. That knowledge comes from having been in that federal hearing room. A TV lawyer with no trials of this kind behind him simply never picks it up. I do.

Unscheduled Back Injuries At Halter Marine And The Port Of Gulfport

Back injuries are not on the LHWCA schedule. Compensation for them comes through Section 908(c)(21) and rests on lost wage-earning capacity. When a Halter Marine welder or Port of Gulfport cargo handler can no longer do the physical work of his career, the carrier hires a vocational expert to dig up light-duty work somewhere in the national job market that the worker could theoretically do for pay. Those jobs set the post-injury wage-earning capacity. Every drop in what those jobs pay cuts the weekly benefit that much further.

The carrier’s vocational expert always finds jobs. His job is to find them. To answer him you need three things. First, your own vocational expert. Second, medical records that spell out specific physical restrictions in terms that turn straight into occupational limitations. Third, a lawyer who has already cross-examined the insurance company’s vocational expert at a federal LHWCA hearing. The TV lawyer has not. For the statewide framework that applies to all Mississippi longshore workers on this issue, the Mississippi longshore permanent disability schedule page covers it in full detail.

Hearing Loss At Halter Marine And The Port Of Gulfport: The Most Undercompensated Scheduled Disability

Both Halter Marine and the Port of Gulfport produce noise environments that exceed safe daily exposure limits. Under the LHWCA schedule, bilateral hearing loss carries 200 weeks and unilateral loss carries 52 weeks. Take a longshore worker earning $1,500 per week. Losing hearing in both ears is worth up to $200,000.00 in scheduled compensation, and where it lands inside that range depends on how severe the impairment is. Most Gulfport longshore workers with significant occupational hearing loss never file a claim. They do not know it is compensable. The carrier is not going to tell them. Before you give the adjuster a recorded statement about anything, get the free book below first. And for the full disability framework that applies to all Gulfport longshore injuries, the Gulfport longshore lawyer page covers the complete picture.

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