Work at the front lines is characterized as a "professional assembly line" on which staff mediate the competing accountabilities of the WSIB as an institution (e.g. serving conflicting stakeholder interests) and navigate the difficulties and uncertainties associated with human service work. To accomplish their work in this context, front-line staff engage in strategic "discretionary" and "discursive" practices, some involving the construction of worker "unworthiness". Such constructions are tied to the perceived failure of workers to play the role expected of them, the moral illegitimacy of economic motivation for workers, and the functional administrative uses of unworthiness as a basis for keeping the work process moving and evaluating claims. These and other aspects of the WSIB-client encounter (e.g. telephone based interaction, exclusion of the social and non work-related dimensions of injury) create conditions that can undermine and fracture injured workers’ identity and sense of being understood, and perversely and unintentionally stigmatize them.