All posts by Kit Case

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Poem That May Resonate for You

Connections brought me in touch with a poet from Eastern Washington, Charlie Hopkins.  I found that several of his poems describe work, workers, the aches and pains of growing older and the ties that bind us all together.  The following poem caught my eye:

MORNING PRAYER FOR CAROL

“Everything that touches you.” The Association

May she sleep well at night.
Wake without pain in her shoulder.
May her knee and hip not cry out, bringing her too soon
to this world.
May blue jays speak respectfully at her windows.

Let there be peace in her morning contemplation
a perfect cup of coffee in her hand.
May Carol enjoy everything she sees and hears, everything she touches
and tastes.
May she always delight in the face she sees in her mirror.

Let the first incident of the day that would disturb her peace
not happen.
Let her go at her own pace and never tire of beauty.
May beauty flow in her as mercy and as a joyful song.
May she enjoy her garden as she does her flying dreams.

May there always be harmony between us and trust and may our eyes
be creased with smiling.

You can find more of Mr. Hopkins work on his blog, “The Flood Plain – Poems by Charlie Hopkins” and in a published collection of his work, “I Need To Feel You Every Moment In My Heart”, available on lulu.com.

Sometimes, you meet the right person at the right time, even on the internet.

 

 

Unemployment

Why Injured Workers (and their lawyers) Should Care About Unemployment Compensation Changes

Today’s post comes from guest author Thomas Domer, from The Domer Law Firm.

Eligibility for Unemployment Compensation in Wisconsin will change substantially in 2014.  For more than 70 years, an employee would only be found ineligible for Unemployment Compensation if he quit a job or was found guilty of “misconduct”.  Misconduct was defined under a 1941 case as “willful or wanton disregard of an employer’s interest.”  Mere inefficiency or unsatisfactory conduct or failure in good performance as a result of an inability to meet job expectations was not misconduct.

As a result of the aggressive efforts of Republican lawmakers (who ignored “agreed-upon” bill proposed by the non-partisan Unemployment Compensation Advisory Council) many workers will be deemed ineligible for Unemployment Compensation benefits. 

A new basis for disqualifying workers from receiving Unemployment Compensation benefits will be called “Substantial Fault” which may include a series of inadvertent errors made by the employee and violations of work requirements after the employer warns the employee about the infraction.

In addition, a series of situations in which a voluntary resignation would not disqualify a worker from benefits have been severely restricted. 

In the worker’s compensation arena, if an employer terminates an employee because of a work injury, or unreasonably refuses to rehire the employee after a compensable work injury, a penalty of up to one year of wages applies.  The purpose of the statute is to prevent discrimination against employees who have previously sustained injuries, and if there are positions available within the injured employee’s restrictions, to assure that the injured person goes back to work with his former employer.  This statutory protection is an exception to the general rule of “at will” employment in Wisconsin – where an employer can hire, fire, and make employment decisions for any reason or no reason at all except for a discriminatory reason defined by law (like race, gender, religion).  Under the Wisconsin Worker’s Compensation Law, a work injury is essentially an additional protected category.  The worker’s compensation Labor Industry and Review Commission has held that refusal to rehire benefits are not “back pay for Unemployment reimbursement purposes.” 

Under Unemployment Compensation law, no finding of fact or law made with respect to liability under the UC provisions is binding in an administrative proceeding under the Worker’s Comp law.  As such, the Unemployment decision generally is inadmissible in a worker’s compensation hearing.  However, some litigants attempt to use an Unemployment Insurance file for other purposes – beyond the findings of fact and conclusions of law – in a worker’s compensation hearing.  A finding in the Unemployment Compensation arena by an initial Unemployment Compensation deputy, for example, may prove admissible in the worker’s compensation arena on the issue of misconduct, thus providing the employer in a worker’s compensation claim a defense to a refusal to rehire claim.

Employer Fraud, fighting fraud, Insurance, Workers' Compensation

$46 Million Stolen: 2013’s Top Ten Workers’ Compensation Fraud Cases

Professor Leonard T. Jernigan Jr. has compiled a list of 2013’s Top 10 Workers’ Compensation Fraud Cases

Today’s post comes from guest author Leonard Jernigan, from The Jernigan Law Firm.

Employer Fraud Cases (9):$44,064,492.00
Employee Fraud Cases (1): $1,500,000.00
Total: $45,564,492.00

Every year we hear about fraud in Workers’ Compensation cases and the public believes the fraud is employee driven. However, in 2009 I began tracking the Top Ten Fraud Cases and 100% of the Top Ten between 2009-2012 involved employers or shady characters posing as legitimate businesses. The amount of employer fraud is staggering. In 2013 one employee fraud case did crack the Top Ten, so the record is now 49-1 (employer fraud v. employee fraud) over the past five years.

  1. Florida: Owners of Diaz Supermarkets in Miami-Dade are Accused of $35 Million Fraud (4/16/13)

    John Diaz and his wife Mercedes Avila-Diaz owned and operated four supermarkets in the Miami-Dade area. They have been arrested and accused of workers’ compensation fraud and other fraudulent transactions totaling $35 million. One business they operated had no coverage for employees for ten years. They allegedly engaged in a scam to help subcontractors obtain false certificates of insurance that allowed the subs to work for general contractors who required the certificates.

  2. California: Hanford Farm Labor Contractor Convicted of Fraud in the Amount of $4,195,900 (12/6/2013)

    Richard Escamilla, Jr.

    Richard Escamilla, Jr. (47), owner of ROC Harvesting, misrepresented information to workers’ compensation insurance carriers by using new business names to obtain insurance and avoid providing a claim history. Escamilla pleaded guilty on October 29th and was sentenced to pay restitution of $4.1 million and serve six years in prison.

  3. Michigan: Insurance Executive Embezzled $2.6 Million from Workers’ Comp TPA (06/06/2013)

    Jerry Stage

    Jerry Stage (67), the former CEO of a non-profit workers’ compensation insurance company, and George Bauer (55), the bookkeeper, both pleaded guilty to embezzling from the Compensation Advisory Organization of Michigan (CAOM) for more than a decade. Mr. Stage embezzled $2.6 million from the company and conspired with Mr. Bauer to cover up the embezzlement.

  4. California: Employee Wasn’t Wheelchair Bound After All – Fraudulently Took $1.5 Million in Benefits (8/9/13)

    Yolandi Kohrumel

    Yolandi Kohrumel, 35, claimed for nine years that she was wheelchair bound after complications from toe surgery, but after she had collected $1.5 million in benefits it was revealed her claim was false. Her father, a South African native, was also engaged in the scam. Both pleaded guilty to insurance fraud, grand theft and perjury. Ms Kohrumel was sentenced to one year in jail, plus restitution.

  5. California: Father and Son Landscapers Accused of $1.45 Million in Insurance Fraud (5/7/13)

    Sunshine Landscaping

    Jesse Garcia Contreras (57) and Carlos Contreras (33), who operate a Thousand Palms landscaping business, are accused of committing $1.45 million in insurance fraud. They are accused of defrauding the California State Compensation Insurance Fund by misclassifying employees from January 2008 to March 2012. Mr. Jesse Contreras is the president and CEO of Sunshine Landscaping and his son is Director of Accounting. If convicted, they each face up to 19 years and 8 months in prison.

  6. Florida: Workers’ Compensation Check Cashing Operation Charged with $1 Million in Fraud (2/27/13)

    As a result of its investigation of I&T Financial Services, LLC, a company that was allegedly set up to execute a large scale check cashing scheme for the purpose of evading the cost of workers’ compensation coverage. Domenick Pucillo, the ringleader of the fraud scheme, was arrested and charged with filing a false and fraudulent document, forgery, uttering a forged instrument, and operating an unlicensed money service business. If convicted on all charges, he faces up to 45 years in prison. $1 million was seized during this investigation.

  7. West Virginia: Coal Company Contractor in Mingo County Caught in $405,000 Scam to Avoid Workers’ Comp Premiums (11/6/13)

    Bank of Mingo

    Jerame Russell (50), an executive with Aracoma Contracting, LLC, a company that provided labor to coal companies on a contract basis, entered a guilty plea to a scam that involved funneling over $2 million through a local bank to pay employees in cash, thus avoiding payroll taxes and $405,000 in workers’ compensation premiums. Aracoma also bribed an insurance auditor to cover up its true payroll.

  8. Ohio: Roofing Business Owners Guilty of $283,592 in Workers’ Comp Fraud (7/30/2013)

    Frederick Diebert

    The owners of Triple Star Roofing were found guilty of fraud on July 15 for failing to report payroll to the Ohio Bureau or Workers’ Compensation(BWC). The company failed to report to the BWC from 2004 to 2008, resulting in under-reported premiums of $283,592.

  9. Florida: Owner of Staffing Company arrested for $130,000 in Workers’ Comp Fraud

    Preferred Staffing of America, Inc.

    The owner of Preferred Staffing of America, Inc., a temporary staffing agency in Tampa, has been arrested for allegedly running an organized workers’ compensation fraud scheme. Preferred Staffing’s owner misled clients into believing that his company was a licensed professional employer organization (PEO) and could provide workers’ compensation insurance coverage. Employers were reportedly charged more than $130,000 for workers’ compensation insurance and other services that were never provided.

For more information, contact: Leonard T. Jernigan, Jr. Adjunct Professor of Workers’ Compensation N.C. Central School of Law The Jernigan Law Firm 2626 Glenwood Avenue, Suite 330 Raleigh, North Carolina 27608 (919) 833-0299 ltj@jernlaw.com www.jernlaw.com @jernlaw

Uncategorized

The 50-year war on smoking

Luther Terry

Today’s post was shared by Gelman on Workplace Injuries and comes from www.latimes.com

The 1964 U.S. Surgeon General’s report on smoking — the first official acknowledgment by the federal government that smoking kills — was an extraordinarily progressive document for its time. It swiftly led to a federal law that restricted tobacco advertising and required the now-familiar warning label on each pack of cigarettes.

Yet there was nothing truly surprising about the conclusion of the report. Throughout the 1950s, scientists had been discovering various ways in which smoking took a toll on people’s health. Britain issued its own report, with the same findings, two years before ours. Intense lobbying by the tobacco industry slowed the U.S. attack on smoking. And even when then-Surgeon General Luther Terry convened a panel before the report was issued to make sure its findings were unimpeachable, he felt compelled to allow tobacco companies to rule out any members of whom they disapproved.

Saturday marks the report’s 50th anniversary. The intervening decades have seen remarkable progress against smoking in the United States, despite the stubborn efforts of the tobacco industry, which lobbied, obfuscated and sometimes lied outright to the public about the dangers of its products. During those years, though, independent research tied smoking and secondhand smoke to an ever-wider range of ailments. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, smoking causes cancer of the lungs, larynx, bladder, bone marrow, blood, esophagus, kidneys and several…

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Employer Fraud, Misclassification

NEOC Awards Whistleblower Client Misclassified as Independent Contractor

Today’s post comes from guest author Jon Rehm, from Rehm, Bennett & Moore.

I was happy to have the chance to represent Theron Chapman in his whistleblower claim against his former employer, Midwest Demolition. While the Lincoln Journal Star headline of “Man chased from job by manager with stun gun awarded back pay” is catchy, the real story here is that an employee who was fired for complaining of legitimately being misclassified as an independent contractor won some measure of justice from the Nebraska Equal Opportunity Commission.

Mr. Chapman had a legitimate grievance about being misclassified as an independent contractor. Nebraska law explicitly prohibits the type of misclassification that he questioned. In 2010, State Sen. Steve Lathrop, who authored the legislation outlawing misclassification in Nebraska, said in his bill’s statement of intent, as quoted in Truckinginfo: the web site of Heavy Duty Trucking magazine, that:

“When a contractor misclassifies an employee, the employee is ineligible for unemployment and workers’ compensation benefits, loses labor-law protections and does not receive employer-provided health insurance. Misclassification creates an unfair advantage to unscrupulous contractors who are able to outbid law-abiding employers who must take into account the payment of taxes and insurance premiums when bidding for jobs. The State’s loss in revenue negatively affects the funding of essential programs such as unemployment benefits.”

The deeper story here is that people on the margins of the workforce can sometimes vindicate their rights in the workplace. My client was hired through a job lottery at the People’s City Mission, a homeless shelter, here in Lincoln. People in his situation are vulnerable to abuse in the workplace. Not every instance of bad behavior by management is legally actionable, but that is true from the executive suite to low-wage workers like my client. But fair-employment laws can protect people who are being abused in the workplace and do sometimes provided protections to the people who need them the most.

Uncategorized

Beating Back Pain

Today’s post was shared by Gelman on Workplace Injuries and comes from dealbook.nytimes.com

Illustration by Stuart Goldenberg

Two months ago, I stepped into a shower in a hotel room in Baton Rouge, La., and felt a slight twinge in my back. I didn’t pay it much mind. I’ve experienced twinges from time to time, but for more than 25 years, I have been essentially free of back pain.

As you’ve probably guessed, that twinge didn’t go away. Instead, it got worse. It lodged in my lower back, and I could feel the sciatica all the way down to my knee. Within a week, I couldn’t walk more than 100 yards without severe pain.

Among other things, I was embarrassed. In 1987, I wrote an article in New York magazine called “Ah, My Non-Aching Back,” about how I’d found relief through a doctor named John E. Sarno.

By the time I saw Dr. Sarno, I had spent a year in relentless pain, visiting orthopedists and chiropractors, osteopaths and acupuncturists, trying yoga, physical therapy and bed rest, all to no avail.

Dr. Sarno’s treatment was essentially a talking cure. His theory, stated simply, is that back pain develops as a way of unconsciously shifting attention away from uncomfortable feelings such as anger and anxiety. With rare exceptions, Dr. Sarno believes, back pain has no structural basis. Rather, it is almost always a consequence of muscle spasm that prompts pain, which leads to fear, and then more spasm, and eventually creates a vicious cycle of pain. He named the condition tension myositis syndrome.

My prescription was to…

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Corporate Welfare, Food Stamps

Wal-Mart & McDonald’s: Passing the Buck to Taxpayers

Today’s post comes from guest author Charlie Domer, from The Domer Law Firm.

Came across this post today: “How McDonald’s and Wal-Mart Became Welfare Queens.”  News like this has become so commonplace that you almost accept it with a shrug.   Yeah, big box stores and fast food chains are paying their workers cruddy wages, forcing them to go on state health insurance and food stamp assistance.  Oh well.  Move along.  Nothing to see here.

But the outrage should exist.  These stories make my blood boil.  Many of these companies are making massive profits.  You’re telling me you can’t pay a living wage?  All of us, as taxpayers, are helping pad the the coffers of these companies.  By not providing sufficient wages or health care, the actual taxpayers serve as the necessary social safety net for these workers.  Is that really how we want our society and country structured?

Admittedly my experience is anectodal, but I see a number of these workers in my practice–from the greeters at Wal-Mart to those flipping burgers at McDonald’s.  Many are making a minimum hourly wage of $7.25.  No matter how hard they work (and, in my experience, some of these fast food and retail workers are the hardest workers out there, in light of their work condition), they cannot get ahead or make enough to avoid the necessity of seeking food stamp assistance or of searching for the local food pantry.  

Corporations simply should not be able to get rich on the public’s back.  As taxpayers, we continue to allow this grossly one-sided equation to continue.

 

Injury Reporting, OSHA, Safety

Fear of Reporting Safety Claims

Today’s post comes from guest author Thomas Domer, from The Domer Law Firm.

Workers often fear retaliation if they report a safety violation or work injury related to a violation. Concerns about being fired or other forms of retaliation by employers permeate the process of worker’s comp claims filing. Studies have indicated that retaliatory fear prompts many workers not to file either OSHA or workers’ comp claims. Workers also don’t want to be perceived as careless or complaining. In a Government Accounting Office (GAO) study of OSHA reporting, occupational health providers often reported to workers’ fear of retaliation as a reason for underreporting. Fully 2/3 of health providers “reported observing worker fear of disciplinary action for reporting an injury or illness.”

Pressure from co-workers also prompts failure to report safety violations and comp claims. Safety incentive programs (sometimes called “safety bingo” ) create incentives not to report, since non-reporting leads to a reward for a work group. If one worker reports his injury, the entire crew may pay the price. The GAO survey found this peer pressure to be a troubling factor contributing to underreporting to OSHA. (Anecdotally, I remember a worker who cut off his finger on a Friday, wrapped it in a hankie and put it in his pocket , rather than report the injury and disappoint his fellow employees looking forward to a case of beer reward for “100 consecutive safe work days”).

OSHA is currently proposing new electronic, public reporting rules for large employers.

 

 

Uncategorized

Steve Coll: Raising the minimum wage.

Today’s post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.newyorker.com

Comment

by December 9, 2013

In 2005, Alaska Airlines fired nearly five hundred union baggage handlers in Seattle and replaced them with contractors. The old workers earned about thirteen dollars an hour; the new ones made around nine. The restructuring was a common episode in America’s recent experience of inequality. In the decade after 2000, Seattle’s median household income rose by a third, lifted by the stock-vested, Tumi-toting travellers of its tech economy. But at the bottom of the wage scale earnings flattened.

Sea-Tac, the airport serving the Seattle-Tacoma area, lies within SeaTac, a city flecked by poverty. Its population of twenty-seven thousand includes Latino, Somali, and South Asian immigrants. Earlier this year, residents, aided by outside labor organizers, put forward a ballot initiative, Proposition 1, to raise the local minimum wage for some airport and hotel workers, including baggage handlers. The reformers did not aim incrementally: they proposed fifteen dollars an hour, which would be the highest minimum wage in the country, by almost fifty per cent. A ballot initiative so audacious would normally have little chance of becoming law, but Proposition 1 polled well, and by the summer it had turned SeaTac into a carnival of electoral competition. Business groups and labor activists spent almost two million dollars on television ads, mailings, and door knocking—about three hundred dollars per eventual voter. (Alaska Airlines…

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