At its meeting on March 25, 2009, the Board of Directors approved changes to policy items #65.00, #65.01, #65.02 and #65.03 of the Rehabilitation Services & Claims Manual, Volume II. These policies provide direction for determining a worker’s short-term average earnings.

The changes to the Variable Shift Workers policy include:

• adding on-call workers who are regularly employed at differing rates of pay;
• using a period of three months or less to calculate the short-term average earnings; 

• excluding periods of reduced earnings from the short-term average earnings calculations; and
• renaming the policy to “Variable Earnings”. 

Changes were also made to the above noted policies to ensure that the language of the policies reflects the language of the Workers Compensation Act.

The changes are effective June 1, 2009.