Pascagoula Longshore Permanent Disability Schedule

The TV lawyer running ads across the Gulf Coast has never explained the permanent disability schedule to an Ingalls worker or a Bollinger worker or anyone else who has spent years doing hard maritime labor in Jackson County. Not once has he faced a federal Administrative Law Judge and argued the real value of a damaged shoulder, a wrecked back, or hearing loss from decades spent working in Pascagoula’s shipyards under 33 U.S.C. Section 908. Would you let the TV lawyer’s secretary argue your permanent disability case in federal court? She is in the building. The file number is the one thing she has memorized. Not once has she set foot in that hearing room. That is what you get when you call the billboard number for your Pascagoula longshore permanent disability claim. I do things differently. Read this page before you call anyone.

What The Pascagoula Longshore Permanent Disability Schedule Means For Ingalls And Bollinger Workers

Permanent partial disability payouts follow a fixed chart that Congress set down in federal law. The statute goes by Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act, LHWCA for short, and the cite is 33 U.S.C. Section 908(c). Every body part covered by the schedule has a specific number of weeks of compensation assigned to it by Congress. When a Pascagoula shipyard worker suffers a permanent impairment to a scheduled body part, the compensation is calculated as a percentage of that schedule value multiplied by two-thirds of the worker’s average weekly wage.

Here are the schedule values. The figures are 312 weeks for an arm, 288 for a leg, 244 for a hand, 205 for a foot, 160 for an eye, 75 for a thumb, 46 for the first finger, 38 for the great toe, 30 for the second finger, 25 for the third finger, 16 for any toe other than the great toe, and 15 for the fourth finger. Total deafness in both ears pays out for 200 weeks under the schedule. Lose hearing in one ear only and the number is 52 weeks.

Back injuries are all too common for Ingalls welders, pipefitters, and shipfitters, who spend whole careers hunched in tight hull spaces. Those, and any other injury the schedule leaves out, land in the unscheduled permanent partial disability bucket, which is Section 908(c)(21) of the LHWCA. What you receive there depends on the wage-earning capacity you actually lost, not on a number fixed in advance by a schedule. Both kinds of claim draw a hard fight from the carrier. The fight looks different but the goal is identical: pay you as little as possible.

Say a Pascagoula worker makes $1,500 per week and ends up with a permanent 30 percent arm impairment. The schedule gives roughly 94 weeks of compensation at $1,000 per week, which comes to $94,000.00 for that one body part. All the carrier wants is to push that impairment rating down to 20 percent or below. Between your pocket and theirs, that one swing moves $30,000 to $40,000. That fight is what your lawyer is for. The TV lawyer has never had it.

Pascagoula Longshore Permanent Disability Schedule: How Ingalls And Bollinger Carriers Fight It

The carriers handling Ingalls Shipbuilding and Bollinger Shipyards claims have been processing LHWCA permanent disability cases in the New Orleans district for decades. They are not guessing. They have a list of independent medical examiners whose impairment ratings on carrier-retained cases consistently come in below the ratings assigned by treating physicians. They send your injured Ingalls worker to that examiner. The examiner uses the AMA Guides to the Evaluation of Permanent Impairment and makes every judgment call in the direction that benefits the carrier.

The AMA Guides contain ranges and options at every level of the rating process. A physician who has spent years producing ratings for insurance carriers does not produce the same number as a physician who treats injured workers and documents their limitations fully. On one and the same injured worker, the gap between the two ratings is often 10 to 20 percentage points. Figured against Ingalls or Bollinger paychecks on a scheduled body part, that gap runs to tens of thousands of dollars.

These cases are decided in the argument over the disability rating, and everything else follows from it. I know the carriers’ preferred examiners in the New Orleans district. I know their history on the stand. I know which questions expose the gap between their ratings on carrier cases and their published academic positions. The TV lawyer who has never been in that federal hearing room does not know any of this. He takes what the carrier’s examiner produces and tells you it is a fair offer. It is not. For the broader picture of how this system works across MS, see the Mississippi longshore permanent disability schedule page.

Unscheduled Back Injuries At Ingalls: The Wage-Earning Capacity Battle

Back injuries are not on the LHWCA schedule. Section 908(c)(21) pays for them, and the measure is how much wage-earning capacity was lost. For an Ingalls pipefitter or a Bollinger rigger who has spent 20 years doing heavy physical work and can no longer do it, the carrier’s approach is to hire a vocational expert who identifies light-duty jobs in the national economy the worker theoretically could perform. Whatever those jobs pay becomes the number used for post-injury wage-earning capacity. Pick low paying jobs for the list and your weekly benefit shrinks right along with the wage they pay.

The carrier’s vocational expert will find jobs. He always finds jobs. His job is to find them. Countering his testimony requires your own vocational expert, a medical record that documents the specific physical restrictions your back injury imposes with enough precision to hold up under cross-examination, and a lawyer who has stood in that federal hearing room and challenged this exact type of testimony before. I have done it. The TV lawyer has not and cannot tell you otherwise with a case name attached.

Hearing Loss At Ingalls: The Most Undercompensated Disability In Pascagoula

Ingalls Shipbuilding is one of the loudest industrial environments in MS. Grinding operations on steel hull sections, plasma cutting, pneumatic chipping, blasting, and welding in enclosed spaces without adequate noise controls produce daily exposure levels that destroy hearing over years of work. Under the LHWCA schedule, losing hearing in both ears means 200 weeks, and losing it in one ear means 52 weeks. Take a worker who earns $1,500 per week. Hearing loss in both ears is worth $133,000.00 in scheduled compensation, and that is before the carrier takes on the audiometric evidence, the causation question and the statute of limitations issue.

The clock on an occupational hearing loss claim starts when the worker learned, or reasonably ought to have learned, the loss came from work. For most Ingalls workers that date is when an audiologist explained the pattern of noise-induced damage in their audiogram. Plenty of Ingalls workers carrying serious noise-induced hearing loss never put in a claim at all. They never learned that the loss is something the law pays for. They do not know the schedule assigns a specific dollar value to it. They do not know the clock is running. The carrier is not going to tell them.

If you have worked in the Ingalls yard for years and your hearing is not what it was, that loss may be compensable right now. Before you call anyone, do not give the adjuster a recorded statement. The Pascagoula longshore recorded statement warning page explains exactly why. Then get the free book below before you make any decision.

The Deadline The Carrier Hopes You Miss

Federal law under the LHWCA gives you two years, a statute of limitations that starts on the date of injury or on the date you first understood, or reasonably should have understood, that your injury was work-related. For traumatic injuries at Ingalls or Bollinger, the clock starts the day of the incident. For occupational conditions, it starts when you knew the connection. Two years sounds like time. It is not. Coworker witnesses leave the yard. Surveillance footage is overwritten. Medical records become difficult to reconstruct. The carrier’s file gets thicker every day while yours does not exist yet.

The Pascagoula longshore claim deadline page covers the timing rules in full. Read it before you decide you have more time than you do. For the complete statewide framework on permanent disability benefits, the Mississippi longshore permanent disability schedule page is the reference. And for the Pascagoula longshore lawyer who has actually tried these disability disputes in front of a federal Administrative Law Judge, the form below is where you start.

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