“I’d only been there a few weeks.”

No probationary period exists

California workers’ compensation coverage is not earned over time. There is no waiting period, no probationary period, and no minimum hours. A worker injured on their first shift has the same rights as one with thirty years.

Temporary, seasonal, part-time, on-call, per diem, and day labor are all covered.

Being paid in cash does not remove you. The law presumes that any person rendering service for another is an employee, and misclassification is the employer’s burden to disprove.

And immigration status does not affect eligibility.

Two things that are affected by short employment

Your average weekly wage

Every wage-based benefit runs off average weekly earnings, and computing them from three weeks of work can produce a distorted number.

§ 4453(c)(4) exists for exactly this. Where the ordinary methods “cannot reasonably and fairly be applied,” earnings are taken at 100% of the sum that reasonably represents the average weekly earning capacity at the time of injury — “due consideration being given to actual earnings from all sources and employments.”

Which means the calculation should reflect what you actually earn as a worker, not what you happened to earn in your first three weeks at one job.

Provide your full picture: prior earnings in the same trade, the offered rate and scheduled hours, other concurrent jobs, and any seasonal or irregular pattern. If you have two jobs.

And the six-month rule for psychiatric claims

Labor Code § 3208.3(d): “no compensation shall be paid… for a psychiatric injury… unless the employee has been employed by that employer for at least six months.”

But the exception is broad and it is the whole ballgame: the requirement does not apply where the psychiatric injury is caused by a sudden and extraordinary employment condition.

A robbery, an assault, a serious accident, witnessing a death, a catastrophic event — those are the fact patterns the exception was written for, and they are exactly the fact patterns that cause psychiatric injury in a new employee.

Note this is a rule about psychiatric claims only. It has nothing to do with a physical injury. Psychiatric injury claims. · If a coworker or customer assaulted you.

And if you were let go right after

The law governs a claim filed after a termination notice, and there are four ways through it — including medical records existing before the notice that show the injury. All four.

And if the termination followed the injury, there may be a § 132a claim and a — usually larger — FEHA claim. Both routes.