Florida: When Worker Moves From Part-time To Full-Time Work, AWW Must be Based on Entire 13-Week Earnings

Where an employee had been working full-time for the employer for three weeks prior to her injury, but had worked part-time for the employer for substantially the whole of the 13 weeks prior to her accident, her AWW had to be computed using the 13-week method set forth in § 440.14(1)(a), Fla. Stat. (2003), in spite of the fact that had she not been injured she would have continued to have been employed at the higher weekly wages, held a Florida appellate court. Citing Wal-Mart Stores v. Campbell, 714 So. 2d 436 (Fla. 1998), the appellate court said that the statute was clear that the employee’s wages over the entire 13-week period must be used. The implication here is that if the employee had begun her work full-time three weeks before the accident, without the prior part-time work for the employer, her AWW would have been significantly higher.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is the co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Great Cleaning Corp. v. Bello, 2016 Fla. App. LEXIS 13341 (1st DCA, Sept. 6, 2016)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 93.01.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law