Workers' Compensation: University of California Irvine

Monday, June 16, 2014

It's A Priviledge

Today's post was shared by WorkCompCentral and comes from daviddepaolo.blogspot.com

We get lost in the world of workers' compensation so deeply, it seems, that we sometimes forget what law really governs our actions.
A recent unpublished (which means that the case is not citable in legal proceedings as authority) opinion by the California Fourth District Court of Appeal reminds us that there are times when the Labor Code, the main governing body of statutes in California workers' compensation, takes a back seat.
One of those times is when it comes to evidence.
Shirley Lappi sustained a workplace injury in 2003 while working as an administrative assistant for the University of California at Irvine. Lappi filed a claim for benefits and demanded that her employer and the insurer produce certain documents related to her claim.
The defendants produced most of the documents, along with a privilege log identifying 205 documents that they asserted were not subject to discovery because of the attorney-client privilege and work-product doctrine.
After reviewing the log, Lappi's attorney objected to the defendants' failure to disclose 47 of the listed documents because they were not communications between the defendants and defendants' attorneys.
A workers' compensation administrative law judge ordered the defendants to provide Lappi with copies of some of the documents.
In her order and opinion, the judge stated that she had determined that the documents, which consisted of communications between claims personnel, were not privileged unless they specifically discussed a...

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Friday, December 13, 2013

The Minimum Wage Ain’t What It Used to Be

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from mobile.nytimes.com

David Neumark is professor of economics and director of the Center for Economics and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine.
Proponents of raising the minimum wage often point out that the real minimum wage is lower now than it was decades ago. But the federal policy aimed at low-wage work and low-income families has shifted — wisely — away from reliance on the minimum wage and toward a generous earned-income tax credit, which is better focused on poor families. There is nothing wrong with reducing our reliance on a less effective policy when we have adopted a more effective one. In fact, we should hope that research on public policy leads to exactly this kind of outcome.

The decline in the real value of the minimum wage is indisputable. As shown in the chart below, the real value of the federal minimum declined sharply over the 1980s, and then further in the mid-2000s, before partly recovering with the fairly steep increases in the minimum wage in 2007-9. But despite those increases and low inflation in recent years, it still remains well below its real value in the 1970s.
There has been a significant policy shift, however, in how to guarantee a minimally acceptable income to families with low-wage workers. In particular, the earned-income tax credit was instituted in 1976, and its generosity has since been expanded considerably.

Through the tax system, the earned-income tax credit pays benefits to families with low income and employed workers. For...

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