WSAJ

Scholarships for High School Seniors

     As part of the Washington State Association for Justice’s commitment to foster an awareness and understanding of the important role that the civil justice system plays in our society, the Washington State Association for Justice sponsors scholarship programs for high school seniors in Washington state. The application deadline for 2014 is March 14th for the following scholarships:

2014 American Justice Video Scholarship Program 

Applicants will be asked to produce a Public Service Announcement (PSA). In 2014, two PSA’s will be selected as scholarship recipients. Each year a new video topic will be chosen, based on WSAJ’s mission statement ideals and dealing with advocacy in the American justice system, and related issues. The 2014 topic is the dangers of texting and driving.

Please click HERE for the 2014 application.

2014 WSAJ Presidents’ Scholarship
First awarded in 1991, the WSAJ President’s Scholarship was established to support and encourage the efforts of high school students who have overcome obstacles to achieve academically and socially. Past recipients have included cancer survivors, auto accident victims and teenagers with physical challenges. Competition for the scholarship has increased each year.

Please clikc HERE for the 2014 application.

If you have questions about either scholarship program, please contact WSAJ directly.

American Workers

Made in America: American Wokers Honored on a USPS Commemorative Stamp

American Workers – USPS Stamp

Today’s post comes from guest author Jon Gelman, from Jon L Gelman LLC.

The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes,” social activist Helen Keller wrote in 1908, “but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.” The Made in America: Building a Nation Forever® stamps honor the courageous workers who helped build our country.

This issuance features five different panes, each with the same 12 stamps, but anchored by different selvage photos. Three of the selvage images and eleven of the black and white stamp images were taken by photographer Lewis Hine, a chronicler of early 20th-century industry.

The panes are designed in three rows of four stamps. In the top row are an airplane maker, a derrick man on the Empire State Building, a millinery apprentice, and a man on a hoisting ball on the Empire State Building. In the middle row are a linotyper in a publishing house, a welder on the Empire State Building, a coal miner, and riveters on the Empire State Building. (The coal miner stamp is the only one of the 12 that does not feature a Hine photograph. The image is from the Kansas State Historical Society.) In the bottom row are a powerhouse mechanic, a railroad track walker, a textile worker, and a man guiding a beam on the Empire State Building.

On the selvage, Hine’s images include two Empire State Building iron workers and a General Electric worker measuring the bearings in a casting. The fourth selvage photograph is the same image of the coal miner that appears in the stamp pane. The final selvage photograph, taken by Margaret Bourke-White, depicts a female welder.

Derry Noyes was the project’s art director and designer. The Made in America: Building a Nation stamps are being issued as Forever® stamps in self-adhesive panes of 12. Forever stamps are always equal in value to the current First-Class Mail® one-ounce rate.

Made in the USA.

Issue Date: August 8, 2013

Workers' Compensation

Is It Really WorkMAN’s Compensation or Workers’ Compensation?

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

I often hear my clients refer to their work-injury claim by the antiquated term, “workman’s compensation.” This was formerly the common vernacular when referring to a work-injury claim. Now however, most – if not all – jurisdictions have adopted the more gender-neutral term “workers’ compensation.”

Why the change? While one would have a strong argument that the change reflects the new age of political correctness, an equally compelling case can be made that the change was merely to reflect the increasing numbers of work injuries suffered by women. When compared to the times when workers’ compensation laws were initially enacted, more and more women have moved into industrial jobs. Of course, it naturally follows that as women move into more dangerous and laborious jobs, more women are going to be injured on the job.

For example, in Nebraska 42.7% of all reported work injuries were to women, according to the Nebraska Workers’ Compensation Court Statistical Report For Injury Years 2003 – 2012.  So, while I certainly understand when my clients say “workman’s compensation,” once in a while I jokingly remind them that all injured workers are covered, regardless of their gender. 

Uncategorized

North Dakota blast prompts review of oil train safety

Safety of oil cars to be reviewed

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

A federal safety alert Thursday warned that crude oil flowing out of new fields in North Dakota may be more flammable than expected, a caution that comes several days after a train carrying about 3.5 million gallons of the same oil crashed in the state and set off a massive explosion.

The accident on the BNSF Railway, the fourth such explosion in North America involving crude oil trains, has fed mounting concerns over public safety as the rail industry sharply increases the use of rail to transport surging crude production in North Dakota, Texas and Colorado.

Following the latest derailment and crash, which forced the evacuation of more than 1,000 residents from the town of Casselton, the National Transportation Safety Board has launched the nation’s first broad examination of the safety of moving petroleum by rail.

Trains carrying oil have multiplied across the country as environmental concerns and political maneuvering have delayed approval of a major new pipeline to transport oil to Gulf Coast refineries. The issue may be most crucial for cities in the West, which were often founded and developed by railroads so that main lines go directly through the centers of today’s urban areas.

Crude oil shipments by rail have shot up 25-fold in the last several years as producers rush oil from newly developing shale fields to market. California alone has seen a fourfold increase over the last year, with current shipments of about 200,000 barrels a month.

Refinery operators this…

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Future Medical Expenses, Medicare, Workers Compensation

Settling a Workers’ Compensation Claim – Future Medicals and Medicare

Today’s post comes from guest author Kristina Brown Thompson, from The Jernigan Law Firm.

Will Medicare cover my future medical expenses for my workers’ compensation injury if I settle my case? Yes, no, maybe…the answer to this question is always a tricky one. In fact, this is one of the most complex questions that will confront an injured worker at the time of settlement.

Most settlements are final. Once you agree, you may have created a binding contract that will have serious financial repercussions for you and your family. It’s best to be prepared ahead of time so you fully understand the potential impact of a settlement. Settlement agreements cannot be set aside except in very rare circumstances. Before settling your case, you should take a full accounting of your future medical expenses and your insurance coverage. In reviewing your medical needs, do not forget to account for over-the-counter medications. These costs add up quickly over time.

If you are already a Medicare beneficiary, it’s quite likely you will need to set aside a portion of your settlement for future medical expenses. Medicare may refuse to pay for medical coverage relating to your injuries unless you’ve allocated some of the settlement funds for future medicals. Determining how much to set-aside is another complicated question and usually an outside company is hired to help assist with this determination.

Furthermore, injured workers must also take into consideration the fact that there are certain medical expenses that Medicare may not cover. For example, when an injured worker needs someone to take care of them. Medicare will not pay for these services so the injured worker would be forced to pay if she failed to negotiate this amount prior to settlement. Also, even when Medicare does help foot the bill, the injured worker will still likely pay the coinsurance amount (typically 20%). In short, be careful and think about future medical expenses.

Uncategorized

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.

Published by Causey Wright