Sand in the Gears by Andrew O. Smith

Author:Andrew O. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

SLIPPERY SLOPES

It does not always take an evasion out of the system to illustrate some of the problems the workers’ compensation system creates, or at least fails to solve. We recently had a case where a worker slipped on icy steps, fell, and injured himself. The steps were at work and so was he, so he was on the workers’ compensation dole for months while he recovered from this accident. While I am sympathetic—I have been hurt falling like this myself a number of times—I must admit that every time I slipped it was because I was rushing or not paying attention to the surface on which I was walking, and I suspect the same was true for the injured worker here. Nonetheless, the only nexus to work was that the accident took place during the hours he happened to be there. Move these steps to the employee’s house, same result, but no workers’ compensation coverage. A critic would argue that the employer ought to make sure the steps at work are not icy, but as it is everybody’s job to spot and report dangerous conditions, we cannot do any more than expect our employees to notice the condition and take measures to resolve it. After all, a corporation in practice is simply all the people who work for it. The point is that this is a clear-cut workers’ compensation case that hardly has anything to do with “work.”

Then there is the other side. We recently had a worker suffer a heart attack at work, and he did so in a remote location during a scheduled break. Luckily, coworkers came upon him and discovered his limp body within a few minutes of his collapse. We had purchased an automated external defibrillator and trained a number of employees in its operation, one of whom resuscitated the fallen employee and saved his life. While he was fortunate that our company provided a self-funded, short-term disability plan to replace some of his lost wages while he recuperated, there was no workers’ compensation plan to help him, because a heart attack is not considered a work-related injury. Consider, however, that stress is a well-documented factor in contributing to heart attacks and that work, however much we may strive to improve it, is often quite stressful. Who is to say that many years of stressful working conditions did not play a strong, perhaps even primary role in this employee’s heart attack?

Another challenge for the workers’ compensation system is to separate the legitimate claims from the illegitimate. The general problem of workers’ compensation fraud has been noted previously, and there is some reason to think that it may be more prevalent in manufacturing than elsewhere. To the extent manufacturing-related injuries can be worse than service-sector ones, the payoff to fraud is higher in this sector and may serve as an additional inducement. Moreover, the ability to make an end run around the grand bargain is greatly enhanced in the manufacturing sector due to the universal presence of equipment and machines with moving parts.

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