The Politics of Workers' Comp

Tuesday, March 25, 2008 | 0

By the Republican-American

Like the mugger who says he won't kill you if you give him your money, the legislature's Labor and Public Employees Committee is filled with faux kindness this year. Having conceded firefighters are no more susceptible to multiple myeloma, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and prostate and testicular cancer than ordinary people, the panel wants to bestow special benefits upon its friends and supporters in the public-employee unions.

The Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, which has fought the good fight on this issue, presented evidence this month that the entire bill, which includes partial reinstatement of an expensive, unfunded heart-and-hypertension mandate, is unwarranted. What it got was watered down, but still fiscally toxic.

During better times for Republicans in the mid-1990s, the heart-and-hypertension law was repealed. Previously, it was widely believed police and other emergency workers were more susceptible to such diseases than civilians and should get supercharged workers' compensation when felled by them. But research since then, including recent findings by Dr. Noel Weiss of the University of Washington, debunked that myth. The reality is public-safety workers should get the same benefits as anyone else who is unable to work after suffering from these conditions.

However, the politics — the power exerted by the unions — leads to a sharply different conclusion. That's why the committee brings up these issues year after year.

Thanks to the CCM and the committee's three Republicans, including Rep. Selim Noujaim of Waterbury, the committee jettisoned some of the bill's worst elements. Gone are the firefighters' cancer provision and the presumption that public-safety officers' heart disease is job-related. But municipalities still would have to prove public-safety workers who come down with hepatitis, meningococcal meningitis or tuberculosis contracted these diseases somewhere other than on the job. That's hard to do and requires distasteful personal intrusion.

What's infuriating about these constant attempts to inflate public-employee salaries and benefits is the unions do it because they can, because they have access and because Democratic lawmakers count on them at re-election time. These lawmakers should have the courage to back up their union-coddling with funding for the mandates they impose, thereby taking on themselves the political risk of state tax increases such gifts inevitably would require.

This editorial was republished with permission from the Republican-American, a newspaper based in Waterbury, Conn.