Retirement pension poverty among injured workers with long-term workers' compensation claims

Abstract

Achieving adequate incomes to sustain people in their retirement years is a challenge. This paper addresses poverty among injured workers of retirement age when they have been receiving workers' compensation benefits. Guided by governmental management theory, we address procedures that have operated without media or scholarly attention, in order to highlight details in workers' compensation retirement pension policy that contribute to injured worker poverty in older age in Ontario, Canada. We used a mixed methods approach, applying critical discourse analysis to explain (a) policies related to retirement income; (b) rationales that supported a legislative change that reduced retirement pensions; and (c) workers' experiences of living with a workers' compensation pension. Although workers' compensation board retirement income policy was intended to make up for loss of contributions to the Canadian federal pension fund, the Ontario injured workers' retirement pension now pays less than half of the amount workers would have received in the federal pension,a trend that is observable across Canadian provincial workers' compensation boards. Legislative debates about the 1998 bill that halved the Ontario injured workers' retirement pension centred on neoliberal logic of fiscal responsibility. Injured workers and key informants in this study expressed trepidation about injured workers' financial futures.