When Employers Purposely Put their Employees in Harm's Way

Monday, May 17, 2010 | 0

By Sam Gold

Arnold Schwarzenegger and his Chamber of Commerce and insurance industry allies changed the way worker’s compensation works in California when they rammed through Senate Bill 899 in the middle of the night one April day in 2004. Was it a reform? Of course not; anyone in his right mind could have figured that one out, but then these folks had only protecting their precious profits in mind when they pushed this bill through under the threat of a ballot initiative that incidentally would have gone down to defeat if it had been placed on the ballot.

Workers’ compensation has morphed from a social safety net to help those injured at work to a multi-billion dollar money machine for big insurance and there is no level that they won’t stoop to keep it precisely the way that they want it.

Since there are no longer any meaningful penalties to keep employers and insurers from violating the laws, they have turned working Californians in an expendable work force. And no matter what they do to cause these injuries, they know that the “exclusive remedy” provision of the Labor Code is there to shield them from any civil liability.

Let’s look for example at the young lady in Southern California who worked for a property management firm and was told by her employer to clean up a property or risk being fired for insubordination.

What the employer didn’t tell her was that there had been a homicide at the property and that there was biological matter all over the scene. Now most people know that in that type of situation, haz-mat suits and respirators are the norm when dealing with that type of situation. As a matter of fact there are companies who specialize in cleaning up crime scenes because of the hazardous nature of the surroundings and it requires special training and disposal of materials.

Did this young lady’s employer provide her with any of this special equipment? Absolutely not!

And now she has been totally traumatized by what she saw and what she was forced to clean up and is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, which her employer and his insurer are denying with a vengeance.

What about the metal worker whose employer (one of the state’s largest contractors) was too cheap to provide him with proper hearing protection which has caused him a chronic case of tinnitus and severe hearing loss which he has to live with for the rest of his life, and his employer too fought him every step of the way.

What about employers who purposely remove safety guards off of machines to increase productivity and the end result is an employee losing fingers or a limb due to the gross negligence of the employer.

Do you think OSHA is going to do anything meaningful? They are totally toothless!

Is the unholy dollar worth more than the well being of our workers, or at what point will our legislators finally stop taking money from the insurance industry lobbyists and start creating some laws that will protect our work force from these greedy corporate predators and return worker’s compensation to the social safety net that it was meant to be instead of an insurance industry cash machine and fulfill its’ goal of helping to reduce worker injuries?

Sam Gold is volunteer director of the National Organization of Injured Workers, a national injured workers advocacy organization.