SUB BENEFITS AND TRA BENEFITS CAN BE OFFSET/COORDINATED

The Workers’ Compensation Appellate Commission has issued an important opinion addressing whether supplemental unemployment benefits [SUB] and trade readjustment allowance [TRA] benefits can be offset or coordinated against weekly workers’ compensation benefits. The Appellate Commission’s opinion is: Bryce v Chrysler Group, LLC, 2011 ACO #46.

In Bryce, the Appellate Commission says that SUB benefits can be coordinated under the coordination of benefits provision, MCL 418.354, as “wage continuation benefits.” An old Workers’ Compensation Appeal Board had forbidden this on the basis that SUB benefits were not wage continuation benefits. Therefore, this is a new and very positive ruling from the Appellate Commission allowing employers to coordinate SUB benefits under § 354.

The opinion is important for another reason. After an unemployed employee exhausts his or her regular unemployment compensation benefits, he or she is sometimes entitled to a TRA extension of such benefits. The question of whether those TRA benefits are offsetable dollar-for-dollar under MCL 418.358 like regular unemployment compensation benefits has been at times a contentious point. The Appellate Commission majority in Bryce says the TRA benefits are offsetable under § 358, i.e., dollar-for-dollar just like regular unemployment compensation benefits.

Jerry Marcinkoski