“It was my first day.”

Training and orientation count

Paid training, unpaid orientation, onboarding, a working interview, a trial shift, a required certification class — where the activity is required by or for the benefit of the employer, an injury during it is generally industrial.

The question is not whether you were on payroll yet. It is whether the activity arose out of and occurred in the course of employment. The law presumes that any person rendering service for another is an employee, and the burden of proving otherwise is on the business.

And new workers are the highest-risk group

This is not a coincidence, and it matters legally.

Cal/OSHA’s heat standard, 8 CCR § 3395, requires employers to closely observe new workers and newly assigned workers during a 14-day acclimatization period — a rule that exists because the data on new-worker injury is stark.

Which means a heat injury to a worker in their first two weeks is a heat injury the regulation specifically anticipated, and a failure to acclimatize is a documented regulatory failure. Heat illness claims.

More broadly: where an employer put a brand-new worker on a task without training, and knew the task was dangerous, § 4553 serious and willfulSerious and willful +50%, and uninsurable, so the employer pays personally. 12 months. misconduct increases compensation by one-half — paid by the employer personally. Twelve-month deadline. How.

The one thing that is affected

Your average weekly wage, which drives temporary disabilityTD / TTD / TPD Temporary Disability, Total or Partial. Wage replacement while recovering. Two-thirds of average weekly earnings; 2026 maximum $1,764.11/week., and which is hard to compute from a day or a week of work.

§ 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.”

Provide the full picture: the offered rate and scheduled hours, your prior earnings in the same trade, any other job you hold, and any seasonal pattern. The calculation should reflect what you earn as a worker, not what you happened to earn on day one. More.

And the psychiatric exception

The law requires six months of employment for a psychiatric claim — but the requirement does not apply where the injury is caused by a “sudden and extraordinary employment condition.”

A robbery, an assault, a serious accident, witnessing a death — those are exactly the events that injure new employees, and exactly what the exception was written for. Psychiatric injury claims.