This is the question people ask last, in the doorway, after they have already decided not to make a fuss: if I file, can they fire me?
There is a specific answer, it is in the statute, and almost nobody knows it exists.
What Section 120 actually says
Workers’ Compensation Law § 120 makes it unlawful for an employer, or an authorized agent of the employer, to discharge or in any other manner discriminate against an employee as to their employment because the employee has claimed or attempted to claim compensation. The protection extends to workers who have testified, or are about to testify, in a compensation proceeding.
Read the two halves of that. “Or in any other manner discriminate” is broader than firing — it reaches the way you are treated as to your employment. And “claimed or attempted to claim” means you do not need a perfected claim on file. Being punished for trying is covered.
What it does not say
It does not make you unfireable, and anyone who tells you otherwise is setting you up for a disappointment.
An employer can still let someone go for reasons that have nothing to do with the claim — a genuine layoff, a business closing, real performance problems that predate the injury. The statute does not freeze your job in place. What it prohibits is the claim being the reason.
So these cases turn on causation, and causation is usually built out of ordinary things: what happened, when, and what was said.
What the Board can order
On a finding that an employer violated § 120, the Board orders that the employee be restored to employment, or otherwise restored to the position or privileges they would have had but for the discrimination, and compensated by the employer for any loss of compensation arising out of it — together with attorney’s fees as fixed by the Board.
That last clause matters more than it looks. The fee is fixed by the Board and paid as part of the award, which means pursuing this is not something you fund out of pocket while you are already out of work.
One honest caveat about the penalty. The statute also carries a penalty of not less than $100 and not more than $500 against the employer. That money goes to the State, not to you. It is a sanction on the employer, not a payout — your recovery is the restoration and the lost compensation, not the fine.
This is treated as a discrimination statute
It is worth knowing how seriously this provision is taken.
In Matter of Greenberg v New York City Transit Authority, the Court of Appeals addressed damages under § 120 and treated it as an anti-discrimination statute closer in kind to the Human Rights Law than to an ordinary workers’ compensation provision, allowing prejudgment interest on the award.
That is not a technicality. It is the state’s highest court saying this is a discrimination claim, with what that implies about how it is valued.
The deadline: two years
A complaint alleging this kind of unlawful discriminatory practice must be filed within two years of the commission of that practice.
Note what that clock runs from: the discriminatory act, not your accident and not your claim. This is a separate deadline from the ones governing your compensation case, and satisfying one does nothing for the other.
How it is filed
On Form DC-120, the Discharge or Discrimination Complaint, filed with the Board’s Disability and Discrimination Unit — PO Box 9029, Endicott, NY 13761-9029.
The form asks for your employer, your occupation and work location, whether you were discharged, the date of the accident or first day of disability, your WCB case number if you have one, an account of what happened, and the people involved.
What actually proves one of these
Rarely a confession. Usually a pattern, and patterns are assembled from things that seem too small to keep at the time:
- Timing. The gap between the claim becoming known and the treatment changing. Days matter.
- What was said — by a supervisor, in a text, in a meeting. Write it down the day it happens, with the date.
- What changed. Hours cut, shifts moved, the worst assignments, sudden write-ups after years without one.
- Your record before the injury. A clean file that turns into a paper trail three weeks after a claim is filed tells its own story.
- Comparison. How others doing the same job are treated.
- The paperwork you were given — termination letters, write-ups, anything with a reason stated on it. Reasons that shift over time are worth preserving.
Keep copies somewhere that is not your work email or a company phone, because access to both can end the same afternoon your employment does.
If you are being pushed rather than fired
Plenty of employers never fire anybody. The schedule simply gets worse, the assignments get heavier than your restrictions allow, and the message is clear enough.
The statute’s language is “discharge or in any other manner discriminate,” which is why quitting because it became intolerable is a conversation to have before you resign rather than after. If the pressure involves being handed work outside your medical restrictions, our page on light duty offers and refusing them covers that side of it.
And if fear of retaliation is what has kept you from filing at all — particularly if you are worried about immigration status — see our page for undocumented workers. The right to benefits does not depend on status, and neither does this protection.
Talk to a Staten Island workers’ comp attorney
If you have been fired, demoted, or quietly squeezed since your injury, the evidence that decides it is being generated right now — and most of it is not being saved.
Call (718) 701-2776. The consultation costs nothing, and you will speak with me.
Nothing on this page is legal advice about your own claim. Whether particular treatment amounted to discrimination under § 120 is decided by the Board on the evidence in the record.