At a series of public forums held this month by Christine Baker, Director of the Department of Industrial Relations, and Rosa Moran, Administrative Director of the Division of Workers’ Compensation, injured workers have graphically described their experiences in California’s workers’ compensation system. The system they described is one that is plagued with delays and denials of medical treatment, and where disability compensation is grossly inadequate.

CAAA members asked their clients to testify at these forums because ultimately the only measure of the success or failure of the workers’ compensation system is whether injured workers are receiving appropriate medical treatment and adequate disability compensation. As small businesspersons, CAAA members certainly understand the importance of controlling employers’ costs. But past efforts to control costs by adopting “reforms” have instead created horrendous delays and cut already inadequate compensation, and as a result have actually increased costs.

Utilization Review (UR) is a prime example. One of the key goals of the system is to provide prompt and professional medical treatment so that injured workers can return to work as soon as reasonably and medically possible. With the advent of UR, this is just not happening. Although the original concept of UR was to authorize treatment quickly, UR has now become a cottage industry where the norm is not authorization, but rather delay and denial of treatment.
At the forums, injured workers told of months and years of delays and denials of requests for medical treatment. And these are delays and denials of treatment that, in almost all cases, was recommended by the company’s chosen doctor. Many injured workers go months without any treatment or medications due to the UR process. The constant denial of recommended treatment has delayed injured workers’ recovery and has kept them off work much, much longer than needed.

At the Los Angeles forum Michael McClendon, an injured worker from Bellflower, told the panel that he injured his back in 1999 but “ever since SB 899 was enacted, I have experienced unnecessary delays and denials. My medicine, therapy, and surgery have all been denied. I have to go to court to order the insurer to approve treatment, even though I have been rated 100% disabled with medical and home care.”

At the Fresno hearing Mary DeSoto, an injured worker from Exeter, told the panel of tearing muscles in her neck and shoulder moving a bookcase at work. Although her doctors recommended surgery for both her neck and shoulder, her insurer repeatedly denied these surgeries, and she “had to go to court twice to order the workers’ comp insurer to approve the recommended treatment. It has been a horrendous three years.”

Those are just two of the many stories that were related by workers up and down the state. And as horrible as these delays are for injured workers, they are not the only victims – employers also pay for these delays. The system costs that are increasing fastest are so-called “cost containment” expenses, primarily the cost of UR and bill review, and medical-legal costs. If we want to control employers’ costs, these are the areas on which we need to focus.

And delay is not the only problem facing injured workers. A number of workers told the panel of their struggle to keep their homes and provide for their families on their meager disability compensation. This should come as no surprise to anyone. Multiple independent studies, including studies conducted by the California Commission on Health, Safety and Workers Compensation (CHSWC), and the Administration itself, have documented that compensation for permanent disabilities was cut fifty to seventy percent by SB 899, a “reform” bill enacted in 2004.

Under SB 899, injured workers saw their disability compensation plummet to near the bottom of the 50 states. In addition, their medical care has been delayed and denied to the point that many physicians will no longer treat injured workers. This is not only contrary to our state Constitution, which mandates full medical treatment and adequate compensation, but it is just plain wrong. We can, and should, work together to remedy this horrible situation for Californians who are injured while working.

By Brad Chalk | 04/25/12 12:00 AM PST

By Sarah Jaffe
AlterNet

With the new year, we’ve seen a new round of attacks on working people. Just last week, Arizona Republicans introduced a bill attacking public workers that makes Wisconsin’s look mild by comparison. And just in time to add fuel to the fire, the Congressional Budget Office released a study on government employees’ earnings that has the Right buzzing – and even some progressive pundits repeating the myth that government workers are “overpaid.”

When it comes to wages and benefits, those government workers have unions to thank for their good fortune. The CBO notes that around 21 percent of the federal workforce is unionized, as opposed to the 8 percent of the private sector that enjoys union protections. Longtime organizer and senior fellow at the Citizen Engagement Lab Matt Browner-Hamlin pointed out to AlterNet that the private sector labor movement has been decimated by decades of concerted attacks, and indeed in the last year we’ve seen moves both successful and unsuccessful (Scott Walker in Wisconsin, John Kasich in Ohio) to curtail the power of public sector unions on the state level.

And yet the pundit class seems entirely to miss the point. The Atlantic’s Jordan Weissman delivered a typically glib read of the study, writing “The upshot: Federal pay might be too high overall, and it’s probably not getting us a better government.” This, he said, is “more or less” the finding of the CBO study. That’s actually a massive overstatement, and in the case of the “better government,” almost entirely an ideological read.

Browner-Hamlin said, “Pitting private sector workers against public sector workers is straight class warfare. Rather than helping lift private sector workers up to the salary and benefits public workers have, the effort is to pull public workers down to the depressed levels of their non-unionized, underpaid and un-benefited private sector peers.”

He continued, “It’s much more beneficial for elites to have the 99% fight against itself for scraps than look at the source of their problems above them.”

The CBO’s findings were much more complicated than Weissman’s simplistic analysis would suggest. While federal employees with no more than a high school diploma made 21 percent more per hour—including their benefits—than private-sector employees of approximately the same level of education, those with a bachelor’s degree were approximately equal, and federal workers with a doctorate or professional degree made 23 percent less per hour than their private sector colleagues.

But you won’t catch too many pundits wondering if private-sector workers with advanced degrees are overpaid. No, instead it’s time once again to call for pay cuts at the bottom—Weissman argues that “as an efficient use of resources, the current setup doesn’t make much sense.” In other words, he thinks we should slash wages on the less-educated workers to be able to pay those at the top more money.

Why the obsession once again with cutting compensation for the working class?

“I was somewhat surprised that the initial reaction to the CBO study focused so heavily on the fact that federal workers with less education earn more in the public sector than their counterparts in the private sector,” Mark Price, labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, told AlterNet. “We probably owe the focus to the fact that the cover of the CBO report is the graphic comparing wages and benefits by educational attainment.”

Price notes that the fact that public workers make more, at the low end of the pay scale, than private sector workers isn’t exactly news, even if it is providing grist for the class war mill right now. John Schmitt at the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that state and local public sector workers earn just below 6 percent more than comparable workers in the private sector—and women in the public sector make 7.4 percent more than those in the private sector. But when he adjusted for experience and education, Schmitt found that overall, public workers actually made about 4 percent less than private sector workers. But instead of trumpeting the fact that the public sector provides a way for women and less-educated people to make better wages, have decent benefits, and support their families, the (white male) pundit class sees this as a negative, that those higher wages should be sacrificed in order to raise the pay of those who already make much more.

“For decades public sector unions negotiated deals which reduced the cost to taxpayers by getting increased health and retirement benefits in lieu of higher salaries,” Browner-Hamlin said. “Targeting them now for being out of step with our essentially unorganized private sector workforce not only requires that we ignore contractual negotiations of the past, but that we forget that the path to reducing the compensation of private sector workers was a deliberate one, orchestrated by the very same types of greedy ideologues who are now attacking public workers.”

Weissman gives a passing nod to the idea that all workers should make a decent living, writing, “It’s great that the federal government is providing livable wages to workers, and their families, who would probably have a tough time of it in the private sector.” But he ignores the history of struggle that won those workers their decent wages and benefits, and also the hits that private sector workers have taken over the past 30 years. Price pointed out that along with the decline in unions in the private sector, the falling purchasing power of the minimum wage and the decline in manufacturing, which used to be a way that less-educated workers could have a middle-class job, have contributed to drive down wages for most people.

“What the CBO study and most other studies of public sector pay reveal is not that the pay systems in government are broken but that middle-class jobs are disappearing from the private sector,” Price said.

Meanwhile on the high end, Price notes that more educated workers stay in the public sector, often, because they are “mission driven”–they are committed to their jobs because they believe in them, not simply because they can make money. While Weissman and Kevin Drum at Mother Jones seem to think that, as Drum puts it, the federal government needs to “compete better for top-level managers and other professionals,” by paying more and that the government would be more efficient as a result, they seem to ignore the idea that paying low-wage federal workers less might make those workers that much less efficient as well. A raise for the workers at the top would have less real impact on their lives than a cut for those at the bottom.

Price also pointed out that the relative equality in pay in the public sector actually helps with morale for all workers. “To take a counter example from the private sector like Apple computers; they couldn’t possibly maintain company morale and productivity if they directly employed manufacturing workers in Cupertino under the same pay and working conditions that allegedly prevail in their contracted factories in China,” he said. “Workers have a sense of fairness that if violated can often undermine productivity. This is the chief reason human resource departments in private companies discourage employees from sharing with one another information about their pay levels.”

It’s not just pay equality that is greater in the public sector. The gender gap, as noted above, is less for public workers, and the racial pay gap is also smaller. (Public sector layoffs, for this reason, have hit women and people of color the hardest in the last few years of austerity—and have fallen hardest on workers without union protections, while union workers were more likely to retain their jobs, as Catherine Rampell at the New York Times noted recently.)

It’s disturbing, then, that the response to a study on workers’ wages should be to call for more inequality, not less.

The obsession with the idea that the private sector’s wages are somehow natural and the result of the “invisible hand” of the marketplace, while the public sector is simply throwing away money, is ideological and the result of years of anti-government rhetoric.

Price pointed out:

“It is a view that assumes the degree of equality in the public sector is unnatural and that the degree of inequality in the private sector is natural. The fact is that neither is natural but the result of policy choices. Worse still, Weissman and Drum both assume that more inequality in the public sector would boost productivity. Several decades of rising inequality in the private sector have yet to produce a surge in economic growth greater than we experienced in the decades following 1945, when there was much less inequality.”

Pundits seem to love the idea that less-educated workers deserve to make less money, while the educated among us should be making more—perhaps because the pundit class itself tends to be educated and well-paid and want to believe that their own success is a matter of merit. Otherwise, why don’t we see more of them making the argument that those well-paid high-school grads working for the federal government must be deserving of their higher wages the same way they assume that PhDs in the private sector deserve to be paid so well?

At a time when the economy remains stagnant because the average worker doesn’t have enough money to spend, anyone arguing that wages should be cut at the bottom and raised at the top is missing the point. Those underpaid, highly educated workers that Drum and Weissman are so concerned about are doing just fine, while those overpaid uneducated workers are forming the base of our rapidly disintegrating middle-class.

“Rather than trying to balance budgets on the backs of the 99 percent, we should be finding ways to lift up private sector workers, increase their pay and benefits, and let them drive the growth of our economy again,” Browner-Hamlin said.

(WNN) San Francisco, CALIFORNIA, U.S.: While employed as a “home-care worker,” Teresa, a Mexican national, often returned to her own home after a day of work demeaned and discouraged. She didn’t talk about it at first, but often witnessed abuse in the house where she worked, watching the disabled woman she cared for each day being torn down by a constant stream of verbal and psychological abuse that came from a domineering mother, a mother who was also Teresa’s heavy handed employer.

For minority immigrant women, domestic service occupations in the United States generally do not provide any bridge or transition to other, better jobs. These jobs are often referred to as an ‘occupational ghetto’ since many of the women end up working for decades in ‘locked-down’ professions.

The 2007 report, Behind Closed Doors: Working Conditions of California Household Workers, conducted intensive research on household workers in California showing that the job primarily consists of female immigrants. It also shows a large disparity between many employers and their employees.

“She made me feel horrible,” explained Teresa describing her abusive employer in a public report made to the National Domestic Workers Alliance. “…and [she] told me I was stupid and I wasn’t worth anything.”

Living in public housing in a San Francisco (California USA) southeastern neighborhood, Teresa has lived her life as a single mother with five children. Many days as her children grew up without her they waited late for their mother to come home. In Mexico Teresa worked in the fields and the factories, but after immigrating to San Francisco she began cleaning homes and caring for children and people with disabilities, a caring that has now lasted for over 20 years.

Findings show household workers often work in substandard and exploitative conditions earning poverty wages many times too low to support their own families. They also lack access to optimum health care. Many are ‘unaffiliated’ workers who work as independents with few opportunities for work in other fields. They are also many times kept away from receiving career training or advancement because of the intensity of their day-today work.

Fear of Deportation

If Teresa didn’t work long hours, if she took time off to care for a sick child at home or took “too long” with employer-based-errands she could be threatened by employers with something she fears the very most – the status of her immigration.

Threats of police escorted deportation can be used at any moment, at any time, in order to keep nannies and homecare workers ‘in-line.’ It is this fear of deportation that makes these women the most vulnerable to danger while working.

Knowing Teresa’s fears, her employer demands didn’t just include a list of long work hours. Another (male) employer demanded sex from Teresa as well. At one point the demanding happened so often Teresa was forced to quit her job to prevent the ongoing, and torturous, harassment.

In spite of these conditions Teresa has genuinely cared and had deep concern for the children and families of those she has worked for. “I do this work because there are people who need my attention, my patience, and the services I provide,” she shares.

Unlike most Americans Teresa has never had a vacation. She has also never been granted a sick day. Some of her employers have at times even rejected her requests for food or her attempts to take a simple rest break.

While the numbers are hard to track, the California Domestic Workers Coalition says Latina domestic workers currently number approximately 200,000 in the State. Although this number is hard to officially quantify without IRS documentation, many immigrant women are known to be the primary income earners for their families. At the same time many women are denied the same fundamental labor protections granted to countless other California workers.

De-valuing the work of Immigrants

“They have been forced to sleep in rooms without heat, on hard floors, or in moldy basements. At times they use hazardous materials without any safety warnings,” says a 2006 report on Domestic Workers Rights in the United States prepared by the University of North Carolina School of Law Human Rights Policy Clinic for the United Nations Human Rights Committee that is part of the OCHR – Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland.

“Domestic workers are often severely underpaid and without overtime wages,” continues the report. Unfortunately, U.S. laws are inadequate and their enforcement is insufficient…,” stressed the Committee.

A general lack of language skills, coupled with limited understanding of human rights and knowledge of U.S. labor laws, has left most immigrant women workers unable to negotiate or assert better wages or work conditions from employers who may be unethical. Those who are undocumented, or have visas with time limitations like numerous Latina domestic workers, live in constant fear of being deported. This is a vulnerability that leaves them unprotected under conditions of employment that may be critical to their safety

http://womennewsnetwork.net/2012/02/17/immigrant-domestic-workers-bill-equal-rights/

THE FACTS

Routinely putting in extra hours at the office can put a strain on your social life. But can too much overtime cause depression?

Scientists put the question to the test in a study of more than 2,000 white-collar workers. Previous research hinted at a link between long hours and depressed mood, and the researchers, at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in Helsinki, wanted to examine the issue in depth.
For about five years, they collected data on British civil servants. All of the workers, whose average age at the start was 47, had no mental health problems at the outset. And the researchers adjusted their results to rule out other risk factors, like socioeconomic status, social support, gender and substance use.

Ultimately, the men and women who routinely worked 11 hours a day or more had more than double the risk of developing depression compared with those who usually worked eight hours or less.

The study was published last month in the journal PLoS One.

While the results are not conclusive, another recent study, in The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, had similar findings. Looking at 10,000 workers, the researchers found higher levels of anxiety and depression in those who put in the most overtime.

A number of factors might explain the increase in risk. People who work longer hours often sleep less, exercise less and experience more stress. A grinding work schedule can be isolating, cutting into time with friends and family. And it may raise the risk of other health problems, some studies show, including heart disease.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Routinely working long hours is associated with a greater risk of depression, studies show.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/really-the-claim-long-work-hours-can-cause-depression/

“Between May 2007 and February 2011, the number of people who were jobless 27 weeks or more in California rose an astounding 620 percent,” says the EDD report.

Those who are called “long-term unemployed” grew from 15.9 percent of the jobless population in late 2007 to 46.8 percent last March, remaining over 46 percent in December.

“The rapid rise in long-term unemployment can be directly tied to the collapse of the housing bubble in California,” the report continues. “This event had dramatic effects on the construction and finance industries and on the duration of unemployment among workers displaced from these industries.”

It notes that housing construction permits reached a peak of 20,554 in September 2005, then plummeted to 2,418 in January 2009.

Long-term unemployment knows no gender or ethnic boundaries, although Latinos — who were heavily engaged in construction — were hit somewhat harder than non-Latino workers. Among all workers, those middle-aged and older have fared worse than those younger, perhaps reflecting their heavy involvement in construction trades.

Categories: California by the Numbers

Posted by Dan Walters

It’s no accident wages are down while corporate profits are up. As JPMorgan’s July 11 “Eye on the Market” newsletter put it, “Reductions in wages and benefits explain the majority of the net improvement in [profit] margins – US labor compensation is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP.”

The minimum wage sets the floor under wages, and that floor is sinking. The 1956 minimum wage was $8.30, adjusted for inflation.

Today’s minimum wage is $7.25 – just $15,080 annually.

CEOs make more in a few hours than minimum wage workers who care for children, the ill and the elderly make in a year. Median CEO pay was $10.8 million last year among 200 big companies measured by Equilar.