Three Ways Your Past Work Impacts Your Social Security Disability Case
Your past work has an impact on your current Social Security disability case, and I want to help you understand that impact. My name is Kaitlin Wildoner and I’m an attorney who helps disabled clients obtain their disability benefits as quickly as possible so they can focus on getting better. Today we’re gonna talk about three ways that your past work impacts your current Social Security disability case.
Past Relevant Work: Work History for Prior Fifteen Years
First, your past work is known as your past relevant work. It is work that you have done long enough to understand how to do it over the course of the last 15 years.
In the evaluation process for disability benefits, Social Security goes through five steps in which they’re trying to ultimately understand: can you go back to your past relevant work? In making that determination, they will create a residual functional capacity (RFC) based on your medical records. Once they’ve got that RFC, they will take a look at what your past work entailed, both as you described it and as performed in the national economy. SSA uses the Dictionary of Occupational Titles to better understand that work.
This means that when Social Security sends you paperwork such as a Work History Report to fill out, complete it to give them a better understanding of your past relevant work. Of note, the Dictionary of Occupational Titles hasn’t been updated in a very very long time, it’s a little bit outdated, so that Work History Report is really important to help Social Security understand what the job meant for you.
Consider Differences in Various Jobs
Take a cashier, for example. A cashier at Costco versus a cashier at Publix versus a cashier at a clothing store. They all do different jobs, they might have different requirements for their job: can they stand or sit as they need to, do they need to lift heavy objects, or are they just kind of taking the clothes from the customer, scanning them and giving them back. It’s important that Social Security understands your past work, so they can determine if under your residual functional capacity, can you go back to that past work.
The Impact of Age and Past Work
Additionally, depending on your age, if you can’t go back to your past work, that might be enough to get you a disability approval. Social Security looks at what are known as the “grid rules,” and they determine, do you have transferable skills from that past relevant work that could transfer to other jobs at lower exertional levels?
We tend to see this a lot in nursing cases, for example. If you are a registered nurse, or used to be on the floor or in the OR, Social Security (and the vocational experts that are contracted by the agency) will often say that you have transferable skills to sedentary work. That does, of course, depend on all of your conditions. But, I have seen time and time again, nurses in particular, and any highly skilled job really, you learn to do certain transferable skills, so that will also come into play.
Social Security Lawyer
If you are disabled and unable to work, click here to schedule a call or call us directly for a free consultation where we can discuss your case and see what I can do to help you.
