Understanding the Calif. WC System

Friday, March 11, 2011 | 0

By Julius Young
Boxer & Gerson

Is there a way for the workers' comp system to better serve workers in agricultural communities, many of whom are monolingual Spanish speakers and some of whom are employed by uninsured employers?

That's the goal of the Watsonville Law Center and the Agricultural Workers' Access to Health Project, which is a project of California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), and Salud Para La Gente of Salinas.

In the Watsonville/Salinas area, American's salad, berry and artichoke capital, they have partnered with Kaiser to have a community health clinic as a workers' comp provider. The goal is to offer cost-effective workers' comp treatment as part of a comprehensive health outreach to the ag worker community.

Dori Rose Inda, the director of the Watsonville Law Center, has also been involved in a task force to deal with the problem of uninsured employers in the comp system. District Attorneys in Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties have been involved in these enforcement efforts.

Inda has now been awarded a $125,000 James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award for her efforts.

I've never met Inda, but she's well respected by the applicant attorneys who know her. Her efforts represent the best sort of coalition building to bring solutions that work to the workers' comp system.

It's always been interesting to me that some of the best applicant attorneys in some of the agricultural regions of the state (for example, Modesto and Salinas) came out of CRLA.

You can find the website for the Agricultural Workers' Health Project here:
http://www.agworkerhealth.org/

The site for Salud Para La Gente is here:
http://www.splg.org/

Julius Young is a claimant's attorney for the Boxer & Gerson law firm in Oakland. This column was reprinted with his permission from his blog, http://www.workerscompzone.com

The site for the Watsonville Law Center is here:
http://www.watsonvillelawcenter.org/