Temporary disability

When an employee on sick leave draws a daily benefit from a protection plan, almost everything turns on one clause, the most important in the policy and the least read: the one defining temporary disability. It means a medically established inability to work in one's occupation for a limited time; permanent disability presupposes a stabilized condition. Covering inability to follow one's own occupation costs far more than covering inability to follow any occupation, because claims follow the same gap. For French executive staff, the obligation goes back to the national collective agreement of March 14, 1947. Under it the employer pays 1.50% of the first band of pay into a protection plan, allocated as a priority to the death benefit, which practice reads as more than half. The interprofessional agreement of November 17, 2017 carried it over, and most executive plans hang their elimination period and daily benefit on it. The benefit starts after the elimination period, capped by the indemnity principle at the income actually lost across all schemes, so the compulsory scheme, salary continuation and the private plan cannot stack beyond it. It stops on return to work, on consolidation, which opens the move into permanent disability, or at a contractual maximum, generally three years.