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Showing posts with label The Path to Federalization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Path to Federalization. Show all posts

Friday, October 7, 2016

US Department of Labor Urges Major Changes in the Nation's Workers' Compensation System

As The Path to Federalization of the US workers' compensation system broadens, the US Department of Labor has published a report urging expansion of the Federal role in reforming the entire patchwork of state systems. As the Presidential Election Cycle moves ahead, the ultimate outcome will impact the the nation's struggling workers' compensation scheme. Based on historical statements both "Hillarycare" or "Trump Medical," (lead by his advisor, Former Speaker Newt Gingrich,  will focus on this issue. See  my prior blog posts below.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

Workers’ Compensation: The Road Ahead

This article is another installment of my continuing series entitled, 'The Path to Federalization."


Historical analysis of corporate wealth provides insight as to why the Nation’s workers’ compensation, conceived as a remedial social insurance program, has become dysfunctional. The National interest that drives the program is a strong predictor of future coverage for injured workers' and their families.

Over a century ago, in 1911, the US adopted a patchwork of programs to provide benefits to injured workers in a summary fashion. While much has changed over the century, the majority of states continue with the traditional programs, although they are seriously restricted in benefit delivery.

James Surowiecki authored an article, “Moaning Moguls,” in this week’s New Yorker magazine that focuses on why the system has really changed:

 

“A century ago, industrial magnates played a central role in the Progressive movement, working with unions, supporting workmen’s compensation laws and laws against child labor, and often pushing for more government regulation. This wasn’t altruism; as a classic analysis by the historian James Weinstein showed, the reforms were intended to co-opt public pressure and avert more radical measures. Still, they materially improved the lives of ordinary workers. And they sprang from a pragmatic belief that the robustness of capitalism as a whole depended on wide distribution of the fruits of the system.”
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“If today’s corporate kvetchers are more concerned with the state of their egos than with the state of the nation, it’s in part because their own fortunes aren't tied to those of the nation the way they once were. In the postwar years, American companies depended largely on American consumers. Globalizationhas changed that—foreign sales account for almost half the revenue of the S&P 500—as has the rise of financial services (where the most important clients are the wealthy and other corporations). The well-being of the American middle class just doesn’t matter as much to companies’ bottom lines. And there’s another change. Early in the past century, there was a true socialist movement in the United States, and in the postwar years the Soviet Union seemed to offer the possibility of a meaningful alternative to capitalism. Small wonder that the tycoons of those days were so eager to channel populist agitation into reform. Today, by contrast, corporate chieftains have little to fear, other than mildly higher taxes and the complaints of people who have read Thomas Piketty. Moguls complain about their feelings because that’s all anyone can really threaten. “


As income inequality continues to fan the stalemate in Washington, there is little hope for a rescue of the nation’s ailing workers’ compensation system from extinction. Unless corporate greed yields to national interest, workers’ compensation as we now know it, will be subsumed into a program financed by taxpayers instead of consumers.

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Jon L. Gelman of Wayne NJ is the author of NJ Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thompson-Reuters) and co-author of the national treatise, Modern Workers’ Compensation Law (West-Thompson-Reuters). For over 4 decades the Law Offices of Jon L Gelman  1.973.696.7900  jon@gelmans.com  have been representing injured workers and their families who have suffered occupational accidents and illnesses.

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