If you work the trades, your income depends on a body that still works. That is the part a comp check does not account for, and it is why construction claims are the ones most often worth more than the comp system alone will pay. Zavodnick & Lasky Personal Injury Lawyers handles workers’ compensation claims for construction workers in Philadelphia, and the second claim that frequently sits behind them.
Most Philadelphia job sites have four or five employers on them. Only one of them signs your check. The others can be held responsible in a way your own employer cannot, and that is where the real value in a construction injury case usually lives.
Call +1 (215) 875-7030 to find out whether your accident has one claim in it or two.
What Does Comp Actually Pay a Tradesman?
Yes. Construction workers in Pennsylvania are covered employees, and comp pays medical treatment for the injury plus roughly two-thirds of your average weekly wage while you cannot work, up to a state maximum of $1,394.00 per week for injuries on or after January 1, 2026, published by the Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry.
That figure is where trades workers get shortchanged. Your average weekly wage has to include overtime, shift differentials and the hours you actually worked, not a nominal base rate. A carpenter running 55-hour weeks whose wage was set off a 40-hour assumption loses real money every week for years.
If you were told you are a subcontractor rather than an employee, that classification is challengeable. Our page on workers’ comp exemptions in Pennsylvania sets out the criteria.
Can You Sue Anyone Besides Your Employer After a Site Accident?
Often, yes. You cannot sue the company that employs you, but you can bring a claim against any other company whose conduct contributed to the accident. On a construction site there are usually several.
The general contractor. The GC controls site safety, sequencing and access for everyone on the job, including workers it does not employ. Unprotected floor openings, missing perimeter guarding, unsafe excavation and uncontrolled crane operations point here.
Another subcontractor. The trade that built the scaffold, cut the hole, energized the panel or left the debris is a separate company from yours, and it owes you a duty.
Equipment manufacturers. Failed rigging, aerial lifts that tip, saws with defeated guards, and hoists whose brakes fail are product claims.
The property owner or developer. Depending on how much control the owner retained over the work, the owner can be in the case too.
That second claim reaches what comp does not touch. Pain. The permanent loss of what your body could do. The wage gap between two-thirds and whole. Your spouse’s separate claim for the change to your life together.
Worth knowing early: the deadline for a third-party lawsuit in Pennsylvania is generally two years, shorter than the three-year comp filing window. Working from the comp calendar is how these get lost.
Call +1 (215) 875-7030 and we will look at who else was on your site.
Which Construction Injuries Come Through Our Office Most?
Falls from height. Roofs, scaffolds, ladders, leading edges and unguarded openings. Philadelphia’s high-rise work in Center City and the ongoing hospital and lab construction in University City generate these steadily.
Struck-by injuries. Falling material, swinging loads, dropped tools, and vehicles backing on tight rowhouse job sites in North and South Philadelphia where there is no room for a spotter.
Crush and caught-between injuries. Trench collapses, equipment rollovers, and material shifting during unloading.
Electrocution and arc flash. Contact with energized circuits and overhead lines, usually traceable to a lockout decision made by someone other than your employer.
Repetitive and cumulative injuries. Knees, shoulders, backs and hands worn out over a career. Compensable in Pennsylvania, and the ones most often denied on the first pass because there is no single accident to point to.
Federal OSHA enforces construction safety in Pennsylvania, and an inspection file following a serious injury is obtainable and often useful.
How Do Union Benefits Fit With a Construction Comp Claim?
Comp and union benefits interact rather than stack, and the interaction can reduce your weekly check.
Pennsylvania permits an offset against comp for certain other payments, including pension benefits to the extent your employer funded them. For a trades worker whose pension was built on contractor contributions, that is a live issue. Welfare fund coverage for your family, meanwhile, runs on hour bank rules that keep depleting while you are out.
Our page on workers’ comp and unions covers the offsets, the hour bank problem and how contract light-duty language changes what your employer can require.
What If You Cannot Go Back to the Trade?
This is the question that actually matters in serious construction cases, and it is not a medical question. It is an earning capacity question.
Comp eventually pushes toward a return to some work, not necessarily your work. After 104 weeks of total disability, the insurer can request an impairment rating that may convert your status to partial and start a 500-week cap. Vocational evaluators get brought in to name jobs they say you can do, often at a fraction of trade wages.
Answering that takes evidence about what your body can sustain over a full shift, what the local market pays for work you can still perform, and what a trades career was projected to earn. That record is a different exercise from proving the injury happened, and it starts long before anyone raises settlement.
What Guys on the Job Ask Us
I am a union member working out of the hall for a different contractor every few months. Who is responsible for my claim?
The contractor you were working for on the date of injury. For a cumulative injury with no single accident date, the general rule points to the last employer where you had the exposure that caused it, and disputes between contractors on that question are common.
Can I get workers’ comp if I was working off the books or paid in cash?
Yes. How you were paid does not determine coverage. It does make proving your average weekly wage harder, so pay records, texts about hours and rates, and witnesses to your schedule matter more than usual in these claims.
The general contractor’s safety manager told me to fill out their incident report. Should I?
Report the injury, and do it promptly, because notice deadlines are strict. Write the description yourself rather than letting someone else summarize it, photograph what you sign before handing it back, and give the same account to your employer separately.
Your Body Is the Asset. Treat the Claim Like It.
Trades workers tend to file the comp claim, take what it pays, and never find out whether the crane company, the GC or the equipment maker had a role. That gets decided in the first few weeks, when nobody is thinking about it.
Bring the accident, the site, and the names of every company working on it. We will tell you how many claims are in there. +1 (215) 875-7030.
For the benefits and deadlines that apply to every comp claim, see Philadelphia workers’ compensation. For plant and machinery injuries, see industrial accidents.
Reviewed by the workers’ compensation team at Zavodnick & Lasky Personal Injury Lawyers, which represents construction trades workers before workers’ compensation judges in Philadelphia County and the surrounding counties.
