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Showing posts with label Washington. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Washington. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

House Passes Wasserman Schultz Longshore Harbor Workers' Compensation Clarification Act: Protecting Jobs and Keeping Workers Covered

Washington, D.C.– The Longshore Harbor Workers’ Compensation Clarification Act, introduced by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL-23), and passed by the House of Representatives today, reinstated congressional intent to ensure that workers in the recreational marine repair industry have adequate workers’ compensation coverage. This legislation provides a more clear definition of a recreational vessel which allows small businesses in the marine repair industry to forgo duplicative insurance policies while ensuring these small businesses, 95% of which have fewer than 10 employees, can adequately protect their employees without incurring exorbitant costs. 
In 2009, Congress passed Section 803 of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which expanded an existing exception that allowed more recreational marine repair workers to receive workers’ compensation coverage under state law rather than under the Longshore Harbor Workers Compensation Act. This was necessary because repair workers were simply not buying the more expensive longshore policies and were thus left uncovered. Unfortunately, new regulations were issued in 2011 that adopted a definition of a recreational vessel that was far more complicated and onerous than the existing law. In doing so, this new regulatory definition ran counter to what Congress intended.
The Longshore Harbor Workers’ Compensation Clarification Act establishes a workable definition for a recreational...
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Sunday, July 20, 2014

Using Mobile Technology for Work Linked to Higher Stress

Today's post was shared by Work Org and Stress and comes from www.gallup.com

Heavier users carry more stress, but also rate lives better

by Dan Witters and Diana Liu
This article is part of a weeklong series analyzing how mobile technology is affecting politics, business, and well-being.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- U.S. workers who email for work and who spend more hours working remotely outside of normal working hours are more likely to experience a substantial amount of stress on any given day than workers who do not exhibit these behaviors. Nearly half of workers who "frequently" email for work outside of normal working hours report experiencing stress "a lot of the day yesterday," compared with the 36% experiencing stress who never email for work.


Daily Stress by Email Usage and Remote Working Habits
Daily Stress by Email Usage and Remote Working Habits

Time spent working remotely outside of working hours aligns similarly, with 47% of those who report working remotely at least seven hours per week having a lot of stress the previous day compared with 37% experiencing stress who reported no remote work time.
These data were collected from March 24 through April 10, 2014, as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index for a special Gallup study exploring the effects of mobile technology on politics, business, and well-being in the United States. Gallup interviewed 4,475 working U.S. adults, and the findings hold true after controlling for age, gender, income, education, race/ethnicity, region, marital status, and children in household.
Workers Who Use Mobile Technology Rate Their Lives...
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Thursday, January 16, 2014

Supreme Court case highlights U.S. labor agency political divide

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.reuters.com

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - When the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments on Monday in a case involving soda bottler Noel Canning Corp., presidential appointment power will be the main dispute, but the case will also put on display one of Washington's most politically polarizing agencies - the National Labor Relations Board.

Created nearly 80 years ago to supervise union elections and protect workers' rights to organize, the NLRB is a battleground for pro-labor Democrats and pro-management Republicans.

Deep disagreement between the two sides over the NLRB's role - and over organized labor itself - makes disputes involving the board uncommonly bitter and subjects its agenda to constant reshaping, depending on which party controls the White House.

"It's no accident ... that this major constitutional showdown is occurring over appointments to the board," said AFL-CIO General Counsel Craig Becker, a former board member.

Monday's case began as a labor dispute. The NLRB found in February 2012 that Noel Canning, a Pepsi bottler in Yakima, Washington, had reneged on a verbal contract during union negotiations. The company appealed to the courts, attracting the support of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, conservative interest groups and Republican leaders in Congress. The case evolved into a constitutional challenge to the president's power to make appointments to key posts without Senate confirmation.

At issue are "recess appointments" made in January 2012 by...


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Saturday, December 14, 2013

AIA to Urge Renewal of TRIA to Workers Compensation

The American Insurance Association (AIA) will highlight the importance of renewing the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners' (NAIC) 2013 Fall National Meeting, underscoring TRIA's role in the workers' compensation marketplace.   The NAIC meeting will take place December 14-18 in Washington, D.C.
"Workers' compensation insurers are particularly affected by a terrorist attack," said J. Stephen ("Stef") Zielezienski, AIA senior vice president and general counsel. "By definition, workers' compensation policies must cover all risks, including terrorism, because workers' compensation covers all injuries and deaths that are deemed under a state's law as work-related without distinguishing the source of the injury."  Coupled with the nature of a terrorist attack, this makes the risk difficult to manage without the partnership provided by TRIA."
Zielezienski will appear before the Workers' Compensation (C) Task Force on Tuesday, December 17.  In his presentation, Zielezienski will focus on the expected impact on employers, insurers and state regulators should TRIA sunset at the end of 2014.    
"Without TRIA, workers' compensation insurers would have to make difficult decisions on how to manage their aggregated exposure, particularly for geographically-concentrated risks like terrorism," said Zielezienski.  "If an insurance company elects to reduce their exposure by not offering as much capacity, then state residual markets and workers' compensation pools would have to absorb the risk.  Ultimately, workers' compensation insurers would be responsible for these losses because they reinsure these residual market risks, but the extreme losses from catastrophic terrorism could stress the private markets and create economic uncertainty."
Zielezienski will also focus on what responsibilities state governments might assume for workers' compensation should TRIA not be reauthorized.   Both AIA and the NAIC are advocating for the long-term reauthorization of TRIA.  The NAIC passed a resolution at its 2013 Summer National Meeting in Indianapolis urging Congress to reauthorize the successful program. 

Monday, December 9, 2013

Tech Giants Issue Call for Limits on Government Surveillance of Users

Surveillance of workers is a two-way sword. As companies complain about it, they employ surveillance against their own workers to deny work related compensation claims. Today's post was shared by The New York Times and comes from www.nytimes.com

Eight prominent technology companies, bruised by revelations of government spying on their customers’ data and scrambling to repair the damage to their reputations, are mounting a public campaign to urge President Obama and Congress to set new limits on government surveillance.
On Monday the companies, led by Google and Microsoft, presented a plan to regulate online spying and urged the United States to lead a worldwide effort to restrict it. They accompanied it with an open letter, in the form of full-page ads in national newspapers, including The New York Times, and a website detailing their concerns.
It is the broadest and strongest effort by the companies, often archrivals, to speak with one voice to pressure the government. The tech industry, whose billionaire founders and executives are highly sought as political donors, forms a powerful interest group that is increasingly flexing its muscle in Washington.
“It’s now in their business and economic interest to protect their users’ privacy and to aggressively push for changes,” said Trevor Timm, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “The N.S.A. mass-surveillance programs exist for a simple reason: cooperation with the tech and telecom companies. If the tech companies no longer want to cooperate, they have a lot of leverage to force significant reform.”
The political push by the technology companies opens a third front in their battle against government surveillance,...
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Sunday, November 24, 2013

Social Security’s Job

The Social Security system is an "unfair" benefit distribution plan according to some authorities. Compounding this issue is the patchwork of workers' compensation system that all seem to apply different rules for setoff f benefits from lifetime benefits as well as COLA modifications. Choosing the "right" jurisdiction to file a workers' compensation total disability claim can make all the difference in the world for the amount of benefits an injured worker receives during his or her lifetime. Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from economix.blogs.nytimes.com

Ratio of Social Security benefits to Social Security taxes paid, by race or ethnicity and year.
Ratio of Social Security benefits to Social Security taxes paid, by race or ethnicity and year.
Source: The Urban InstituteRatio of Social Security benefits to Social Security taxes paid, by race or ethnicity and year.
Does Social Security need to be fixed?
As Democrats and Republicans grapple over how to reduce the government’s budget deficit in the face of rising costs for pensions and health care, whether Social Security should be touched remains one of the most controversial topics in American budgetary politics.
But something big is missing to the debate over the finances of what is still the largest component of the social safety net: an understanding of how well it does its job.
When you peek under the hood, it doesn’t always look so great. Indeed, this supposedly great redistributive program — which uses a broad tax on all workers to protect the elderly from poverty — exhibits some fairly stark regressive features.
One well-known regressive feature comes from the rule that benefits must be annuitized, paid out over time in monthly installments rather than as a lump sum. This means that richer people who tend to live longer will get a bigger benefit than poorer people with shorter life spans. Survivor benefits redistribute money from the singles — who don’t get the benefit — to the married, who do.
Eugene Steuerle, Karen Smith and Caleb Quakenbush of the Urban Institute in Washington just discovered another unsuspected regressive...
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Thursday, November 21, 2013

Draft Current Intelligence Bulletin “Update of NIOSH Carcinogen Classification and Target Risk Level Policy for Chemical Hazards in the Workplace”

Today's post was shared by Safe Healthy Workers and comes from www.federalregister.gov

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announces the availability of the following draft document for public comment entitled “Current Intelligence Bulletin: Update of NIOSH Carcinogen Classification and Target Risk Level Policy for Chemical Hazards in the Workplace.” To view the notice, document and related materials, visit http://www.regulations.gov and enter CDC-2013-0023 in the search field and click “Search.” Additional information is also located at the following Web site: http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/cancer/policy.html. Comments may be provided to the NIOSH docket, as well as given orally at the following meeting.
Public Comment Period: Comments must be received by February 13, 2014.
Public Meeting Time and Date: December 16, 2013, 9 a.m.-4 p.m., Eastern Time. Please note that public comments may end before the time indicated, following the last call for comments. Members of the public who wish to provide public comments should plan to attend the meeting at the start time listed.
Place: Surface Transportation Board Hearing Room, Patriots Plaza One, 395 E Street SW., 1st Floor, Room 120, Washington, DC 20201.
Status: The meeting is open to the public, limited only by the space available. The meeting space accommodates approximately 150 people. In addition, there will be an audio conference for those who cannot attend in person. There is no registration fee to...
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Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Redefining the Minimum Wage

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

Business has been brisk at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, with a record number of passengers spending record amounts of money eating and shopping. But for an estimated 6,500 workers at the airport and its nearby hotels, car rental agencies and parking lots, the activity has not translated into economic security, let alone prosperity. Wages for airport-related jobs average an estimated $11 an hour, ranging from less than $10 an hour for airline contractors, like baggage handlers and cabin cleaners, to about $13 an hour for car-rental employees.
That could soon change. Although the votes are still being tallied, the people of SeaTac, the small city south of Seattle where the airport is, have shown support for a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage of the airport’s transportation and hospitality workers to $15 an hour, starting Jan. 1.
That would make the minimum wage at Sea-Tac airport considerably higher than Washington State’s minimum of $9.19 an hour. It would be more than the $12.93-an-hour minimum at the San Francisco International Airport, which was enacted in 2000. And it would blow away the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour, in place since 2009, and exceed a proposal in recent legislation, sponsored by Congressional Democrats and supported by President Obama, for a new federal minimum of $10.10 an hour.
All of which makes $15 an hour sound too high. Hardly. Over the last half-century, American workers have achieved productivity gains that...
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Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Calling America: Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello?

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

SINGAPORE — HAVING lived and worked abroad for many years, I’m sensitive to the changing ways that foreigners look at America. Over the years, I’ve seen an America that was respected, hated, feared and loved. But traveling around China and Singapore last week, I was confronted repeatedly with an attitude toward America that I’ve never heard before: “What’s up with you guys?”
Whether we were feared or loved, America was always the outsized standard by which all others were compared. What we built and what we dreamt were, to many, the definition of the future. Well, today, to many people, we look like the definition of a drunken driver — like a lifelong mentor who has gone on a binge and is no longer predictable. And, as for defining the future, the country that showed the world how to pull together to put a man on the moon and defeat Nazism and Communism, today broadcasts a politics dominated by three phrases: “You can’t do that,” “It’s off the table” and “The president didn’t know.” A Singaporean official who has been going to America for decades expressed shock to me at being in Washington during the government shutdown and how old and emotionally depressed the city felt.
“Few Americans are aware of how much America has lost in this recent episode of bringing the American economy to the edge of a cliff,” said Kishore Mahbubani, the dean of the Lee Kuan Yew...
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Monday, November 4, 2013

The End of the Class-Action Carnival

The End of the Class-Action Carnival
Class actions have been a major vehicle to creating safer workplace in the past. It is imperative that the people have their day in court to maintain a democratically balanced system of  government. Today's post article is shared from businessweek.com.

F. Paul Bland Jr. brings class-action lawsuits for a living. Over the years he’s represented groups of plaintiffs in suits against payday lender Check ’n Go and financial institution Wachovia.

He’s worried about business drying up. As a result of hostile Supreme Court rulings over the last several years, scores of mass consumer and employment suits that would have been viable a decade ago have been dismissed, says Bland, a senior attorney with Public Justice, a nonprofit in Washington.

“People bring me cases against cable companies or big employers, and I say, ‘Forget it. It’s impossible. Not even worth trying.’ ”

The mass lawsuit—in which hundreds or even thousands of plaintiffs join together to go after a corporate defendant—is in deep trouble. Growing judicial skepticism toward such suits and toward the lucrative settlements they generate has caused plaintiffs’ attorneys to shy away from accepting lengthy, complicated cases.

That’s tilting the legal playing field decisively in favor of Big Business—and as the Supreme Court reconvened on Oct. 7 for its 2013-14 term, trial lawyers are bracing for more setbacks.
Not everyone is shedding tears. Walter Olson, a legal expert at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, attributes the decline of mass lawsuits to a predictable—and...

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Monday, October 28, 2013

Miners’ deaths aren’t a theme-park thrill

Today's post was shared by Jordan Barab and comes from www.washingtonpost.com

“Alone in the darkness . . . the only sound is the pulsing of your heart as the searing heat slowly boils you alive . . . It was reported to be the worst coal mine accident in history. The families of missing miners begged for help but it was decided that a rescue was too dangerous. The miners were left entombed deep underground.”
So begins the Web pitch for the new “Miner’s Revenge” maze, one of 10 haunted attractions meant to tantalize and terrorize visitors during “Halloween Haunt” at Kings Dominion amusement park in the rolling Virginia countryside about 70 miles south of Washington.
The advertisement continues: “Lamps at their sides and pick-axes in their hands they are searching for the men who left them to die . . . waiting to exact their revenge.”
I haven’t gone through the maze, and I don’t intend to, although Kings Dominion spokesman Gene Petriello offered me a free pass. That’s because Miner’s Revenge hits a little too close to home for me.
From 2010 to 2012, I spent a good bit of time researching a real coal-mine disaster for a book published last year: the massive April 5, 2010, underground blast at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch mine near Montcoal in southern West Virginia. Twenty-nine miners died in what was the worst U.S. coal-mine disaster in 40 years. Three investigations have found that the incident was the result of Massey’s...
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Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Jersey City Mayor Signs Country’s Seventh Paid Sick Days Law

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from thinkprogress.org

Paid sick days vote signs

On Monday morning, Jersey City, NJ Mayor Steven Fulop signed the city’s paid sick days bill into law, which had been passed by the city council in September. The bill is now the seventh to become law in the country, joining New York City; Portland, OR; San Francisco, CA; Seattle, WA; and Washington, DC as well as the state of Connecticut.
Employers in the city with 10 or more workers will now have to provide them with up to five days of paid sick leave a year, with workers earning a day off for each 30 days worked. Workers at smaller businesses will have the right to earn unpaid sick days. Over 30,000 workers who previously had no access to paid sick leave are expected to benefit.
The push for paid sick days legislation at the state and city level is growing. State-wide efforts are underway in Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Vermont. Newark, NJ and Tacoma, WA are also fighting for such bills, and an effort is underway in Washington, DC to expand the city’s current policy to tipped workers.
The evidence from those places that already have laws on the books shows that they are good for business and the economy. Job growth has been stronger under Seattle’s law and business growth is also strong. San Francisco’s law has strong business support and spurred job growth. Washington DC’s had no negative impact on business, while Connecticut’s has come with little cost and big potential upsides. Meanwhile, lost...
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