There’s a good news & bad news situation for occupational injuries in the United States: Fewer people are getting hurt on the job. But those who do are getting less help.
That’s according to a couple of important new reports on how the system for cleaning up workplace accidents is broken — both because of the changing circumstances of the people who are getting injured, and the disintegration of programs that are supposed to pay for them.
The first comes from the Department of Labor, which aims to tie the 3 million workplace injuries reported per year — the number is actually much higher, because many workers fear raising the issue with their employers — into the ongoing national conversation about inequality. In an overview of research on the topic, the agency finds that low-wage workers have disproportionately high injury rates, and that injuries can slice 15 percent off a person’s earnings over 10 years after the accident.
There are two main components to the financial implications of a workplace injury. The first is the legal status of the people getting injured. A staggering number of workers in the construction industry are misclassified as independent contractors, which means they’re not entitled to workers’ compensation payments. Also, more of them are employees of temporary staffing agencies, who tend to be less well-trained and less likely to report their injuries. Businesses will often contract out their most dangerous work, which allows them to keep their own workers’ compensation premiums to a minimum.
The second component is the degradation of workers’ compensation programs themselves. That issue is addressed by the second report out Wednesday, from ProPublica and NPR, which looks at how employers have lobbied states to get out of paying as much as they used to in workers’ compensation, leaving injured workers with inadequate treatment.
Since 2003, the investigation found, 33 states have weakened their workers’ compensation regulations, scaling back the procedures that will be covered and the duration for which benefits are offered. In addition, while businesses often push for reforms on the grounds that workers’ compensation costs are out of control, data shows that premiums are lower than they’ve been at any point since the early 1990s.
Somebody ends up paying for those injuries, though: taxpayers. When a worker ends up unable to work because of an injury, he or she can be covered by Social Security Disability Insurance, a program that has steadily increased in cost over the past two decades. The rise has many demographic factors behind it, but it looks like the abdication of responsibility by employers may have played a role as well.
The Department of Labor has tried to tackle the misclassification problem — which contributes to unsafe workplaces, and prevents those who are injured from getting help — by aggressively pursuing employers abusing the system. But there’s not much they can do about the decline in workers’ compensation coverage. That’s something states are going to address themselves — over employers’ strong objections.
Has your employer been ignoring your workers’ compensation case? Are you having problems getting your paychecks or receiving medical treatment after you’ve been injured in a work-related accident? It might be time to hire a good Mississippi workers’ compensation lawyer to fight for you. If you feel that you have a workers’ compensation claim, contact Chhabra & Gibbs, P.A. today by going to our website at http://www.cglawms.com or calling 601-948-8005.
