Texas law prohibits employers from retaliating against workers for filing a workers' compensation claim in good faith. If you're punished for asserting your rights, that can be a separate legal claim. Talk to a lawyer before assuming you have no options.
Jimmy personally reviews every submission — most people hear back the same day.
Texas Labor Code chapter 451 makes it unlawful for an employer to discharge or otherwise discriminate against an employee because the employee filed a workers' compensation claim in good faith, hired a lawyer to represent them in a claim, instituted a proceeding in good faith, or testified in one.
Where it applies, it is meaningful. Remedies can include reinstatement, lost wages, and in appropriate cases exemplary damages.
Chapter 451 is built around workers' compensation claims. If your employer is a non-subscriber, there is generally no comp claim to file — and Texas courts have typically held that a non-subscriber's employee therefore has no chapter 451 claim.
That matters because Texas is an at-will state. Absent a statute, a contract, or a recognized public-policy exception, an employer may fire an employee for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason. Many injured workers at non-subscriber employers assume they are protected in a way they may not be.
This does not mean nothing applies. Other protections can be in play depending on the facts — retaliation for a safety complaint to OSHA, FMLA interference where the employer is covered, disability discrimination law, or a contract or handbook provision. Which, if any, of those fit is genuinely fact-specific and worth asking about rather than assuming.
Whatever happens to your job, it does not erase your claim for the injury. A non-subscriber negligence case, or a third-party claim against another company, belongs to you whether you are still employed, were fired, or quit. Employers occasionally imply otherwise. It is not true.
Write it down as it happens. Dates, who said what, who was present. Contemporaneous notes are far more persuasive than a reconstruction months later.
Keep the documents. Your reports of the injury, medical restrictions you gave the employer, schedules, write-ups, performance reviews from before the injury, and any texts or emails. Get copies of anything of yours while you still have access to it.
Watch for the pattern. Sudden discipline after a clean record, hours cut, a transfer to work you physically cannot do, or a "restructuring" that reaches only you. Timing is evidence.
Do not sign a severance or release without having it read. These routinely waive claims you may not know you have, including the injury claim.
Authority: Tex. Labor Code § 451.001
It determines whether ch. 451 is even available to you. Everything else follows from that.
What was said, by whom, in front of whom. Written at the time, not reconstructed later.
Injury reports, restrictions, reviews, schedules, texts. Access disappears the day you are let go.
They commonly waive the injury claim along with everything else.
Rear-endings, intersection crashes, uninsured drivers, hit-and-runs — in Houston, El Paso, and everywhere in between.
Federal regulations, black-box data, driver logs, multiple insurers. We move fast to preserve evidence before it disappears.
Hurt on the job for a non-subscriber employer, or injured by a third party at a job site? Texas gives you real options.
When the worst happens, we pursue accountability for surviving families with the care and seriousness it deserves.
La consulta es gratis y confidencial. No paga nada a menos que ganemos su caso. Jimmy contesta personalmente, hoy mismo.
Every day you wait, evidence disappears and the insurer gets ahead. One free call. Straight answers about your case — in English or Spanish. If you need a fighter, you'll have one. If you don't, I'll tell you that too.
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