Most states limit a worker’s remedies for work-related injuries to a workers’ compensation claim against the employer. Such "exclusive remedy" provisions codify a longstanding compromise whereby employers trade liability, regardless of fault, for protection from large tort awards, and employees surrender a cause of action in return for swift but limited financial benefits.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys and like-minded reformers seeking to challenge exclusive remedy provisions have made some progress in recent years. For instance, in August 2014, a judge in Miami-Dade County, Florida ruled that Florida’s workers’ compensation statutes were "unconstitutional" on their face because they no longer provided adequate benefits to injured workers in exchange for them giving up their constitutional rights to pursue civil litigation. In Padgett v. State of Florida, which is currently on appeal, the trial judge declared that statutory changes in Florida had eroded benefits for injured workers to the point that it was no longer a "grand bargain" for the injured workers.

In Morales v. Zenith Ins. Co., however, the Florida Supreme Court recently rejected an attempt to evade the exclusive remedy provisions of Florida’s workers’ compensation law, holding that the challenged provisions barred the estate of a worker killed on the job from collecting a $9.5 million wrongful death judgment against the deceased worker’s former…

Photo by BLOOMBERG A sign marks the entrance to the headquarters of the Social Security Administration located on Security Boulevard in Baltimore, Maryland.

The Social Security Administration’s proposal that workers compensation benefits be reported annually to the agency would increase insurers’ and employers’ paperwork and costs.

“There is a potential here of an extra burden … and potentially extra costs for employers and carriers around the country,” said Rafael Gonzalez, Tampa, Florida-based vice president of strategic solutions at Helios Settlement Solutions, a unit of pharmacy benefit manager Helios.

The requirement likely would be similar to reporting rules implemented by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in 2009, said Brad Peterson, a shareholder at law firm Heyl, Royster, Voelker & Allen P.C. in Urbana, Illinois.

“It would require insurers or others covered under this proposed rule to determine the Social Security status of a particular workers compensation claimant. So it would certainly add a burden in that regard,” Mr. Peterson said.

The mandate is a single paragraph in the Social Security Administration’s proposed fiscal 2016 budget published in February. The administration says it would require “states, local governments and private insurers that administer” workers comp and public disability benefits to report data on those benefits to the administration.

The proposal also would “provide for the…

In recent years, companies have used that freedom to severely curtail long-standing benefits.

Two states, Texas and Oklahoma, already allow employers to opt out of state-mandated workers’ comp. In Texas, the only state that has never required employers to provide workers’ comp, Walmart has written a plan that allows the company to select the physician an employee sees and the arbitration company that hears disputes. The plan provides no coverage for asbestos exposure. And a vague section of the contract excludes any employee who was injured due to his "participation" in an assault from collecting benefits unless the assault was committed in defense of Walmart’s "business or property." It is up to Walmart to interpret what "participation" means. But the Texas AFL-CIO has argued that an employee who defended himself from an attack would not qualify for benefits.

"It creates a race to the bottom."

A 2012 survey of Texas companies with private plans found that fewer than half offered benefits to seriously injured employees or the families of workers who died in workplace accidents. (The state plan, which Texas companies can follow on a voluntary basis, covers both.) Half of employer plans capped benefits, while the state plan pays benefits throughout a worker’s recovery.

Businesses can save millions of dollars by opting out and writing plans with narrow benefits, putting pressure on their competitors to do the same. "It creates a race…

A South Florida appeals court Monday heard arguments in a challenge to the constitutionality of the state’s workers-compensation insurance system —- as two other closely watched challenges also await rulings at the Florida Supreme Court.

The 3rd District Court of Appeal took up a case in which a Miami-Dade County circuit judge ruled last year that a key underpinning of workers-compensation laws was unconstitutional. That underpinning involves cases being handled through the workers-compensation insurance system instead of through civil lawsuits.

The workers-compensation system is designed as a sort of tradeoff: Workers are supposed to receive benefits for on-the-job injuries while not going through potentially costly and time-consuming lawsuits. But Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Jorge Cueto ruled in August that the workers-compensation law preventing cases from going to civil trial —- known legally as "exclusivity" —- was unconstitutional, at least in part because of legislative changes in 2003 that reduced benefits.

"I find that the Florida Workers’ Compensation Act, as amended effective October 1, 2003, does not provide a reasonable alternative to the tort (civil) remedy it supplanted,” Cueto wrote. "It therefore cannot be the exclusive remedy."

During Monday’s hearing, state Chief Deputy Solicitor General Adam Tanenbaum argued primarily that Cueto’s ruling should be overturned for procedural reasons. The case initially involved Julio…

And rates are particularly high among people working in law enforcement, farming, and auto repair, a new study found.

In the first three months of last year, 10 people at Orange, a French telecoms company, killed themselves. It was not the first time such tragedy had struck the mobile giant. The company—formerly known as France Telecom—also reported a rash of self-inflicted deaths between 2008 and 2009. A similar cluster of suicides once gripped Foxconn, where 18 people working at the factory in Shenzhen, China, attempted suicide in 2010, and where another 150 threatened an en masse death jump in 2012 in protest of low wages and poor working conditions.

Though there haven’t been such notable concentrations of workplace suicides at one company like that in the United States, in 2013, the last year for which data are available, 270 people in the U.S. committed suicide at work—a 12 percent increase over the prior year.

“The reasons for any suicide are complex, no matter where they take place. Usually many factors are at play,” says Christine Moutier, the chief medical officer of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP). Among them are economic and work-related stressors.

One recent study found that the global recession that began in 2007 could be linked with more than 10,000 suicides across North America and Europe.

“Historically, suicide rates do rise during economic downturns. The entire…

At the time of their accidents, Jeremy Lewis was 27, Josh Potter 25.

The men lived within 75 miles of each other. Both were married with two children about the same age. Both even had tattoos of their children’s names.

Their injuries, suffered on the job at Southern industrial plants, were remarkably similar, too. Each man lost a portion of his left arm in a machinery accident.

After that, though, their paths couldn’t have diverged more sharply: Lewis received just $45,000 in workers’ compensation for the loss of his arm. Potter was awarded benefits that could surpass $740,000 over his lifetime.

The reason: Lewis lived and worked in Alabama, which has the nation’s lowest workers’ comp benefits for amputations. Potter had the comparative good fortune of losing his arm across the border in Georgia, which is far more generous when it comes to such catastrophic injuries.

This disparity grimly illustrates the geographic lottery that governs compensation for workplace injuries in America. Congress allows each state to determine its own benefits, with no federal minimums, so workers who live across state lines from each other can experience entirely different outcomes for identical injuries.

Nearly every state has what’s known as a “schedule of benefits” that divides up the body like an Angus beef…

Juries must decide whether California drivers for the ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft are employees entitled to minimum wages, expenses and other workplace benefits, two San Francisco federal judges ruled Wednesday, rejecting the companies’ argument that the drivers must be considered independent contractors.

U.S. District Judges Edward Chen, in the Uber case, and Vince Chhabria, in the Lyft case, said the drivers resemble contractors in some respects, such as their ability to choose their work hours and the riders they accept, and employees in other respects, such as the companies’ control over drivers’ interactions with customers and its power to fire them at any time. “A reasonable jury could go either way,” Chhabria said.

The rulings were nonetheless at least a partial victory for the drivers, who filed the suits as proposed class actions on behalf of all drivers in California.

It’s actually “a major victory for the drivers,” said Shannon Liss-Riordan, a lawyer representing thousands of drivers for both Uber and Lyft. She said the judges “agreed with many arguments we made about why the facts point to an employment relationship.”

The stakes are considerable. State law entitles employees to minimum and overtime wages, reimbursement for work expenses, workers’ compensation benefits for job-related injuries, and unemployment insurance. Independent contractors receive none of those. A driver’s status…

Even though it’s now old news that sitting is killing us all, people still sit a whole lot, especially at office jobs. Standing desks are one solution, but office workers often have to take the initiative to request one from their employers. What if, instead, an office’s very design simply ruled out the option of sitting all day?

RAAAF (Rietveld Architecture-Art Affordances), a Netherlands-based experimental studio that works at the intersection of visual art, architecture, and science, collaborated with artist Barbara Visser to design "The End of Sitting," a conceptual office with no chairs and no traditional desks. Instead, the office is filled with faceted three-dimensional geometric shapes on which workers can stand, lean, perch, or even lie down. Viewed from above, the white objects resemble an artist’s abstract rendering of cracked glacial ice more than furniture. They range from waist-height to shoulder-height, allowing workers to change positions throughout the day.

The designers spent 10 days building the labyrinthine "experimental work landscape" from plywood frames and a secret render (described as being "as hard as concrete") at Looiersgracht 60, an Amsterdam-based exhibition space. "The End of Sitting" is part art installation, part psychological study: it’s the visual component of architect Erik Rietveld’s research project, called "The Landscape of Affordances: Situating the Embodied…