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There is a federal statute known as the Jones Act which allows employees to file lawsuits directly against their employers. In order to qualify under the Jones Act, the employee must be a “seaman” which generally means that the employee worked aboard a vessel. Once the employee is determined to have qualified under the Jones Act, he can then file suit to collect several different types of damages from his employer.

At the outset, two important facts should be mentioned first before the types of damages that are recoverable under the Jones Act are addressed. First, in order to recover any damages under the Jones Act, the injured maritime worker or the injured seaman must prove that his employer was negligent in causing or contributing to his injury or that the vessel was unseaworthy which caused or contributed to his injury. The Jones Act is a fault based statute which means that in order to receive any recovery under the Jones Act the employee must prove fault. Also, the damages that an employee is allowed to collect under the Jones Act are separate and apart from “maintenance and cure” benefits which the employee can recover under general maritime law.

The Jones Act allows an injured employee to recover general damages including pain and suffering and emotional damages. Typically there is no set scale or limitation on the amount of general damages that the employee can recover. However, almost all courts will enforce a jurisdictional scale on the amount that can be recovered for general damages relating to the particular injury suffered by the employee. Most damage Awards which are received through a formal trial rather than settlement can be reviewed by the trial judge or appellate court to determine if the Award is inadequate or excessive. Therefore although there is no formal limitation on the amount that can be awarded for general damages, as a practical matter the injured employee’s Award may be reviewed and lowered or increased if it is excessive or inadequate.

Past and future lost wages can also be collected under the Jones Act by the injured employee. In order to prove past and future loss of wages, the injured seaman must present evidence concerning the amount of his earnings at the time of his injury as compared with the amount of earnings that he will be capable of in the future due to his injury. In other words, in order to collect any type of lost wages the employee must show that he is actually losing wages due to his injury. Lost wages cannot be “speculative” or based upon mere “hope” that the employee would have made higher wages in the future had it not been for his injury. Most courts will generally look to the amount the employee was actually earning at the time of the injury and compare that to the amount that the employee will most likely earn in the future due to his injury.

An injured employee can also collect his past and future medical expenses under the Jones Act. In order to collect any type of medical expenses under the Jones Act the employee must simply prove that the medical expenses are “reasonable and necessary” and that “more likely than not” the employee has or will incur such expenses. Usually medical expenses must be proven through expert medical testimony. Courts will not allow an injured seaman to collect medical expenses which are merely speculative and are not based upon medical testimony.

The Jones Act also allows an injured seaman to collect for the value of the fringe benefits which he may lose due to his injury. These fringe benefits typically include loss of health care benefits, disability benefits, retirement benefits and other employer-provided benefits to the employee prior to his injury. In order to collect loss of fringe benefits usually it requires an expert economist to determine the exact value of the loss of fringe benefits since this amount will need to be calculated into the future. The Jones Act even counts the loss of meals which may have been provided to the injured seaman while he was employed!

The Jones Act is a very special federal statute since it allows injured seamen to file suit for all of the above damages. Normally work-related injuries fall under very restrictive “compensation statues” which prevent the employee from collecting pain and suffering, loss of fringe benefits and the full value of his loss of wages. The Jones Act does not work in such a fashion and for this reason most injured seamen receive much more recovery under the Jones Act than they would under a workers’ compensation statute.

For more information about the Jones Act, visit JonesActLaw.com. It is important that injured seamen protect and understand their rights under the Jones Act.