When an office injury is industrial in nature

In December of 2006, a 37-year-old man from Birmingham received an award of industrial injury compensation after making a no win, no fee claim with the help of our panel of leading UK personal injury solicitors.

He had developed Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) after spending long deskbound hours working at his job as an internet copywriter.

Now having received extensive treatment for his RSI, funded by an award of industrial injury compensation, he is back at the helm of a keyboard attempting to forge a career as a journalist.

In conversation with the no win, no fee solicitor who represented him he offered to write an article for our website detailing his experiences of RSI and the industrial injury compensation claim process.

Here is his story.

Industrial injury agony
I was 35 and in the second year of employment for the company when I first noticed something was wrong.

Sometimes I would be seized by terrible cramps, aches and pains in my hands and wrist. It was acute and unbearable, causing me to visibly wince, then just as soon as the symptoms appeared, they would disappear.

At that stage, I didn't think a great deal of it. Somehow I imagined the whole thing would just be temporary.

Looking back at that time now, in light of my diagnosis and subsequent industrial injury compensation, I realise that, given the conditions I was working under, my RSI symptoms should hardly have come as a surprise.

Five days a week I would work nine-hour shifts, with rarely anything more than a half-hour break each day.

Many of my colleagues would jokingly refer to our copywriting office as the writing factory'.

The more I think about it, the more I realise how apt a description this was.

It's only a wonder that more of us from that office didn't develop RSI-style industrial injuries.

The pressure on each of us to produce thousands upon thousands of words of copy each day was intense. The collective noise produced by our keyboards sounded more like a cacophony of firing machine guns than a professional, considered and serious working environment.

After a while, it became clear to me that the symptoms I was suffering were not going away. If anything, they were increasing in both intensity and frequency.

My desk and chair had always been a poor match for each other. In fact, on several occasions over the course of my employment at the company, I had reported to my boss that their pairing promoted poor posture and caused me considerable discomfort. My requests for a more suitable desk and chair were routinely ignored.

During times where, experiencing pain and discomfort, I asked for more breaks to rest my ailing hands or risk sustaining personal injury, compensation was somehow meant to be found in my bosses retort, "No pain no gain. No one ever got rich or successful by moaning about their weak wrists."

With my condition deteriorating, I was forced to take a week off work and went to see my GP.

After extensive medical attention, I was diagnosed with Repetitive Strain Injury. I cannot begin to describe my shock when I heard my doctor say the words, "You have an industrial injury."

I remember thinking that the diagnosis could not be right. "How" I thought, "Could I have an industrial injury when I don't even work in an industrial setting?"

Then I remembered the colourful writing factory' analogy which my colleagues had concocted.

Rather than being treated like a valuable employee and a human being with rights and basic needs, I had been worked relentlessly and callously as if I were some piece of dispensable industrial machinery.

Most people are probably familiar with the clichd scenario where if you newly acquire, say, a yellow VW Beetle, you'll suddenly start to see yellow VW Beetles on every road you travel.

This phenomenon occurred with my RSI. Suddenly I was meeting some of the 150,000 people in the UK who suffer from the condition each year as a result of their occupations, whereas before I had hardly even been aware of the condition.

Worryingly, of these RSI sufferers only around 3,000 successfully claim industrial injury compensation.

Then one day, as a natural progression of the Yellow Beetle phenomenon, not long after returning to work and still struggling to get my employers to do anything to adapt to my condition, I read a news story about a former broadsheet newspaper worker who had successfully claimed £37,500 in industrial injury compensation.

The fact that, only that day, my boss had been putting undue pressure on me to turn out yet another 8,000 words of copy, coupled with the news story made me decide that enough was enough.

It was then I decided to contact YouClaim, who put me in touch with a no win, no fee solicitor from their panel who was local to my area.

Within six months of my first call to YouClaim, I had received a payout of industrial injury compensation for my Repetitive Strain Injury.

Though my compensation claim award of £7,000 was much less than the payout I had read about, I felt it adequately reflected the suffering I had been made to endure.

Also, the ruling recognised the fact that my employers had failed to do enough to protect me, had not made adequate allowance for my condition and had contributed to the development of my RSI through a culture of negligent working practices. It felt like justice.

Now the industrial injury compensation claim is behind me, I feel much better about the future.

I've had extensive physiotherapy and currently practice Alexander Technique exercises designed to protect and strengthen me from the condition.

Only a couple of weeks ago, I returned to my keyboard, and am now working slowly towards returning to fulltime employment.

There is no way that, this time, I will let any employer exploit me to the point where I develop an industrial injury. One no win, no fee claim is enough for me this time I know my rights.

This article may be published on another website free of charge, on the condition that a link is provided from this article to our website: http://www.youclaim.co.uk/work-accident-compensation-claims-msd.htm

Can I claim?