A letter arrives from your employer offering you light duty. You read the description and it does not sound light. You are still in pain, your doctor has you on restrictions, and the job on the page looks like the one that hurt you with a few words changed.
The question everyone asks next is whether they can say no. The honest answer is that you can — nobody forces you into a building — but what happens to your weekly check afterward depends on things you should understand before you answer.
The arrangement is not symmetrical, and that cuts both ways
Start with what the Board itself says, because it surprises people on both ends.
Your employer has the right to offer you a light duty job if one is available while you cannot do your regular job. Your employer is not required to create one. And the Workers’ Compensation Law does not require your employer to hold your job for you if you cannot work because of the injury and the position has to be filled for business reasons.
So there is no obligation running toward you. Many injured workers never get an offer at all, and that absence is not a violation of anything.
But the reverse is also true. Nothing in the law drafts you into a job. What refusal does is change the question the Board will be asking about your benefits — and that is where the damage happens.
If you accept: how the check changes
Going back to work at lower pay does not mean losing benefits. It usually means a different benefit.
Where your disability keeps you from earning what you earned before, you may be entitled to reduced earnings benefits, which pay up to two-thirds of the difference between your wages before the injury and your wages after it. The starting figure is your average weekly wage, which is why an incorrectly calculated AWW quietly costs you money for as long as the reduced earnings run.
If you go back and then miss days because of the injury — a bad week, a treatment day, a flare-up — that time can be compensable too. The Board calls it intermittent lost time. Keep a record of those days as they happen, because reconstructing them from memory a year later is close to impossible.
Everything you earn has to be reported accurately, including a side job or cash work. That is not a footnote. It is the fastest route into a Section 114-a problem, and those penalties are far worse than anything light duty costs you.
If you refuse: what the Board actually decides
Refusing suitable work does not trigger an automatic penalty with a name. It does something quieter and, in practice, worse.
The Board’s position on partially disabled workers is that if you fail to make reasonable efforts to find work within your restrictions, you can be treated as having voluntarily withdrawn from the labor market — and that ends the payments. Turning down work that was within your restrictions, offered by the employer who already knows your restrictions, is about the cleanest example of that anyone could construct.
Then the burden moves. The courts have put it plainly: where employment is lost for reasons other than the compensable injury, the claimant bears the burden of establishing that the disability contributed to any later reduction in earnings. Whether your reduced earnings are causally related to the work injury is a factual question for the Board to resolve.
Read that as a practical matter rather than a legal one. Before the refusal, the carrier is explaining why you should not be paid. After it, you are explaining why you should. That is a different case, and a harder one.
When saying no is defensible
Sometimes it is. The whole issue turns on one question — was the work actually within your restrictions? — and the answer is medical, not a matter of opinion.
Offers that do not survive that question tend to look like this:
- The duties exceed the limits your treating doctor set — lifting above your cap, standing beyond your tolerance, climbing, repetitive use of the injured part.
- The restrictions being used are from an independent medical examination your treating physician disagrees with.
- The job description is vague where it matters — “occasional lifting” with no weight, “mostly seated” with no hours.
- In practice it is your old job under a new label, and everyone involved knows it.
What makes any of these worth anything is medical documentation that came before the refusal, not after. A note from your doctor saying the offered duties exceed your restrictions carries weight. The same note obtained three weeks after you stopped answering the phone carries much less.
What to do the day the offer arrives
- Get it in writing, with the actual duties, hours, and pay. A verbal offer nobody wrote down becomes whatever the other side later says it was.
- Do not refuse on the spot. Say you will review it with your doctor. That sentence is not a refusal and it buys you the time you need.
- Bring it to your treating physician and have them address the specific duties against your specific restrictions, in writing, on the record.
- Call your attorney before you answer. Not after.
Most of the damage we see in these cases was done in the first 48 hours, by someone who was in pain and angry at a letter and said no to a supervisor before anybody looked at the restrictions.
Trying it and failing is not the same as refusing
This distinction matters more than almost anything else on this page.
If you attempt the light duty in good faith and cannot physically sustain it, that is evidence about your condition. If you decline it without attempting it, you have handed the carrier an argument instead.
So if you do try it and it goes badly, document it while it is happening. Report the difficulty to your supervisor and get it in writing. See your doctor promptly, describe exactly which duties caused which symptoms, and make sure it is in the record. A failed work attempt that nobody wrote down is, to the Board, a work attempt that did not fail.
How this connects to labor market attachment
Light duty and labor market attachment are the same question asked from two directions: is this person still in the workforce to the extent their injury allows?
Accepting light duty generally answers it. You are working within your restrictions, which is precisely what attachment is supposed to demonstrate. Refusing it does the opposite, and if the job then disappears you are left needing to prove attachment from a standing start with a refusal already in the file.
If you are not working and no offer has been made, the rules are on our pages about labor market attachment and how to show it. If the dispute is already headed to a judge, what happens at your hearing covers the day itself.
Talk to a Staten Island workers’ comp attorney
If you are holding a light duty offer and you are not sure whether it is within your restrictions, that is a phone call worth making the same day — before you answer your employer, not after.
Call (718) 701-2776. The consultation costs nothing, and you will speak with me.
If what you are really asking is how much longer the benefits run at all, that is answered on how long workers’ comp lasts in New York.
Nothing on this page is legal advice about your own claim. Whether particular work was within your restrictions, and whether a reduction in your earnings is causally related to your injury, are questions the Board decides on the facts of your case.