Today we take workers compensation laws for granted, but the protection they afford to employers and employees alike was unheard of in the old common law rules they replaced. The biggest improvement centered around how the new laws handled responsibility for injury. It used to be that an injured worker could not collect medical costs or lost wages until he or she could prove that the injury would not have happened "but for" the employer's negligence. Workers comp laws changed all that. Today, employees are entitled to medical costs and partial lost wages any time they are injured on the job, not just when someone can be proved to have done something wrong. Obviously, this was a great benefit
