Workers' Compensation

Monday, November 25, 2013

Macy’s Joining Wal-Mart on Thanksgiving Energizes Labor

Macy’s Inc. (M), whose annual Manhattan Parade is a cherished Thanksgiving tradition for millions, is starting a new holiday ritual: It’s asking its employees to show up for work.

Pressured by competition, a shorter shopping season and lackluster consumer spending, at least a dozen U.S. mega-retailers are opening for the first time on Thanksgiving Day,such as Macy’s, or opening earlier that day than in previous years. They are following Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT), the largest U.S.employer, which has been open for business on Thanksgiving for more than 25 years.

“Another holiday bites the dust in favor of retailers,”Candace Corlett, president of New York consulting firm WSL Strategic Retail, said in a Nov. 12 phone interview. “Our Culture now is to shop, and to get the best deals. Thanksgiving As a day of rest was another culture, another time, not today.”

The expansion of hours will take more than a million employees away from their families during the holiday. Organized Labor has been encouraging low-wage employees to join unions foryears to stem membership losses, and now wants to use the Thanksgiving hours to encourage workers to band together to improve working conditions.

“It plays into the larger themes that we’ve been pushing around low-wage workers who don’t have a lot of job security,”Amaya Smith, a spokeswoman for the AFL-CIO, said in an interview. “Thanksgiving, Black Friday is one example of one holiday...

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Accelerated aging found in long-term unemployed men

Today's post was shared by RWJF PublicHealth and comes from www.medicalnewstoday.com

Men who are unemployed for more than two years show signs of faster ageing in their DNA, a new study has found.
Researchers at Imperial College London and the University of Oulu, Finland studied DNA samples from 5,620 men and women born in Finland in 1966.
They measured structures called telomeres, which lie at the ends of chromosomes and protect the genetic code from being degraded. Telomeres become shorter over a person's lifetime, and their length is considered a marker for biological ageing. Short telomeres are linked to higher risk of age-related diseases such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
The researchers looked at telomere length in blood cells from samples collected in 1997, when the participants were all 31 years old. The study, funded by the Wellcome Trust, found that men who had been unemployed for more than two of the preceding three years were more than twice as likely to have short telomeres compared to men who were continuously employed,.
The analysis accounted for other social, biological and behavioural factors that could have affected the result, helping to rule out the possibility that short telomeres were linked to medical conditions that prevented participants from working.
This trend was not seen in women, which may be because fewer women than men in the study were unemployed for long periods in their 30s. Whether long-term unemployment is more harmful for men than women later in life needs to be addressed in future studies.
The Imperial team...

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November 22: Clara Lemlich

Clara Lemlich made a spontaneous speech at Cooper Union on this date in 1909 that sparked the “Uprising of the 20,000,” an industry-wide strike mobilized by the new International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

“I want to say a few words!” shouted Lemlich, a 23-year-old garment worker (usually described as 19), following AFL leader Samuel Gompers’ speech. She was a member of the ILGWU’s executive board and had been arrested seventeen times, with broken ribs to show for it. “I have no further patience for talk,” she said upon reaching the podium, “as I am one of those who feels and suffers from the things pictured. I move that we go on a general strike . . . now!” The strike lasted until February and was met with constant violence, but at its end the union had increased its membership from thehundreds to some twenty thousand, and most of the major sweatshop owners had signed union contracts — except for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. Lemlich remained an activist throughout her life until her death in 1982 at 96. (For a brief Jewish Currents interview with Clara Lemlich in the year of her death, visit our archive and scan down to “L.”)

“If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise.” —Traditional Yiddish oath, led in recitation by Clara Lemlich after the strike resolution passed

The Jewish Currents Pushcart now carries a...

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Red Bird Express sued for allegedly refusing to rehire injured worker

Today's post was shared by votersinjuredatwork and comes from www.naidw.org

A Worden trucking company is accused of refusing to allow an employee to come back to work after he was hurt on the job.

Christopher Chancey filed a lawsuit Oct. 24 in Madison County Circuit Court against Red Bird Express.
Chancey says he began working for Red Bird Express in December 2010. In August 2011, according to the complaint, Chancey was injured while working and filed a workers’ compensation claim which allowed him to take time off and receive benefits.
Chancey claims his doctor said he was ready to return to work full-time onApril 15. However, when he went back to Red Bird and asked to be reinstated in his position Chancey says he was told by the company that his job had been filled and there was no other work available. Chancey also alleges Red Bird did not fill his vacant position until after his doctor released him to work again.
The trucking company is accused of violating Illinois’ Workers’ Compensation Act after failing to recall Chancey to work which Chancey contends was in retaliation for filing an on-the-job injury claim. Chancey asks for more than $100,000 in punitive and compensatory damages for lost wages, lost benefits and costs of the lawsuit.
Attorneys Thomas C. Rich, Kristina D. Cooksey and Michelle M. Rich of Fairview Heights represent Chancey.
Madison County Circuit Court Case No. 13-L-1788

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Illinois Employer to Pay $10K Penalty for Lack of Workers’ Comp Insurance

Today's post was shared by votersinjuredatwork and comes from www.insurancejournal.com

An uninsured employer in Illinois has pled guilty to a Class 4 felony for refusing to obtain workers’ compensation insurance, the Illinois Workers’ Compensation Commission announced.
John Linek, individually and as president of SMS Logistics of Chicago, has been ordered to pay a $10,000 penalty for refusing to obtain workers’ compensation insurance.
The IWCC’s Insurance Compliance Unit had been requesting compliance with the Act from this trucking firm since 2010.
In August 2013, the Compliance Division obtained a felony conviction against Ahmed Ghosien, d/b/a Ghosien European Auto Werks in Hometown. Ghosien pled guilty to a Class 4 felony for failing to obtain workers’ compensation insurance.
The IWCC’s Insurance Compliance Unit worked with the Cook County Sheriff’s Office and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Special Prosecutions Division to obtain the conviction.
Again, the Insurance Compliance Unit had worked on the case since 2010.
Both of these individuals were given many opportunities to obtain insurance before charges were filed, but they persistently refused, the IWCC said.

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Workers Compensation For Firefighters Discussed

The Kentucky Association of Firefighters is backing legislation that presumes full-time firefighters who develop cancer got it on the job and would be eligible to collect workers compensation.
Representatives of the organization made their case in Frankfort on Thursday (Nov. 21) before House and Senate members of the Interim Joint Committee on Labor and Industry.
They were joined by Doctor Virginia Weaver, a physician and professor of Occupational Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. She says the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health is doing some important research on the hazards of firefighting.
“They’re looking at firefighters from three major cities in the U.S., comparing risk for cancer in firefighters with the general U.S. public, and found an increased overall risk for all cancer, an increased individual risk focused in the digestive tract and the respiratory tract.” –Virginia Weaver
The bill that’s being proposed in Kentucky would only apply to professional firefighters who’ve been on the job at least five years. It would also exclude those who smoke.

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These Are The 36 Countries That Have Better Healthcare Systems Than The US

12 years ago, the World Health Organization released the World Health Report 2000. Inside the report there was an ambitious task — to rank the world's best healthcare systems.
The results became notorious — the US healthcare system came in 15th in overall performance, and first in overall expenditure per capita. That result meant that its overall ranking was 37th.
The results have long been debated, with critics arguing that the data was out-of-date, incomplete, and that factors such as literacy and life expectancy were over-weighted.
So controversial were the results that the WHO declined to rank countries in their World Health Report 2010, but the debate has raged on. In that same year, a report from the Commonwealth Fund ranked seven developed countries on their health care performance — the US came dead last.
So, what can we learn from the report?
NOTE: The rankings are based on an index of five factors — health, health equality, responsiveness, responsiveness equality, and fair financial contribution. As noted above, all data is from 2000 or earlier and these findings have been questioned.

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Sunday, November 24, 2013

Aid Programs Helped U.S. Survive the Great Recession

moffitt

The country’s welfare programs scored high marks during the Great Recession, according to a new report by Robert A. Moffitt, the Krieger-Eisenhower professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University.

The report, published this month in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, shows the country’s “social safety net” expanded to catch many Americans during the economic downturn, which lasted roughly from 2008 through 2009.

In “The Great Recession and the Social Safety Net,” Moffitt found aggregate safety net spending rose $500 billion from 2007 to 2010. Meanwhile, caseloads rose too, from 276 million to 310 million.

Carrying the bulk of this load, he said, were the Earned Income Tax Credit, Unemployment Insurance and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Together, the three programs accounted for about a third of the spending increase.

Other programs that expanded to meet the demand included Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security retirement and disability benefits.

“Our results show that there was a major response from the safety net to the Great Recession,” Moffitt said. “The programs did their job and made a difference – there’s no question about it.”

Spending on SNAP – food stamps – more than doubled, Moffitt found, vaulting from $30 billion in 2007 to $65 billion in 2010. The program was not only helping more people, Moffitt said, but...

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A Remedy for Fragmented Hospital Care

Today's post was shared by NEJM and comes from blogs.hbr.org

Fragmented hospital care has been associated with higher hospital mortality and length of stay, and failures of communication and teamwork are the most commonly identified sources of “sentinel events” in hospitals — unexpected occurrences that result in actual deaths or the risk of deaths, or physical or psychological injuries.
Organizational Context
To address this problem, Emory Healthcare (EHC), the clinical delivery arm of the Robert W. Woodruff Health Sciences Center of Emory University and the largest and most comprehensive health system in Georgia, launched its Care Transformation initiative in 2009.
Through the strength of this initiative, in 2012, EHC became the first and only health system in the nation to have two hospitals — Emory University Hospital and Emory University Hospital Midtown — simultaneously in the top 10 in the University HealthSystem Consortium (UHC) Quality and Accountability ranking of U.S. academic medical centers. In 2013, these two hospitals were ranked in the top five.
The Care Transformation initiative at EHC has influenced the organization in many ways, one of which was the creation of an environment where the redesign of care models was encouraged.
This piece focuses on the development of a collaborative care model called the Accountable Care Unit (ACU), which became a re-imagining of hospital care inspired by core principles of EHC’s Care Transformation initiative: patient-and-family...

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The ePrognosis App: How Calculating Life Expectancy Can Influence Healthcare Decision-Making

Today's post was shared by The Health Care Blog and comes from thehealthcareblog.com

By Leslie Kernisan, MD

Last month an intriguing new decision support app launched, created by experts in geriatrics and palliative care. It’s meant to help with an important primary care issue: cancer screening in older adults.
Have you ever asked yourself, when considering cancer screening for an older adult, whether the likely harms outweigh the likely benefits?
Maybe you have, maybe you haven’t. The sentence above, after all, is a bit of wonky formulation for the following underlying questions:

How long is this person likely to live, given age and health situation?
Given this person’s prognosis, does cancer screening make sense?

The first question seems like one that could easily occur to a person — whether that be a patient, a family member, or a clinician – although I suspect it doesn’t occur to people perhaps as often as it should.
As for the second question, I’m not sure how often it pops up in people’s minds, although it’s certainly very important to consider, given what we now know about the frequent harms of cancer screening in the elderly, and usually less frequent benefits.
Furthermore, there is abundant evidence that “inappropriate” cancer screening remains common. “Inappropriate” meaning the screening of people who are so unwell and/or old that they’re unlikely to live long enough to benefit from screening.
For instance, one astounding study found that 25% of physicians said...

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U.S. Retailers Decline to Aid Factory Victims in Bangladesh

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

One year after the Tazreen factory fire in Bangladesh, many retailers that sold garments produced there or inside the Rana Plaza building that collapsed last spring are refusing to join an effort to compensate the families of the more than 1,200 workers who died in those disasters.

The International Labor Organization is working with Bangladeshi officials, labor groups and several retailers to create ambitious compensation funds to assist not just the families of the dead, but also more than 1,800 workers who were injured, some of them still hospitalized.

A handful of retailers — led by Primark, an Anglo-Irish company, and C&A, a Dutch-German company — are deeply involved in getting long-term compensation funds off the ground, one for Rana Plaza’s victims and one for the victims of the Tazreen fire, which killed 112 workers last Nov. 24.

But to the dismay of those pushing to create the compensation funds, neither Walmart, Sears, Children’s Place nor any of the other American companies that were selling goods produced at Tazreen or Rana Plaza have agreed to contribute to the efforts.

Supporters of compensation plans say they are needed to pay for medical care for those who are paralyzed or otherwise badly injured, to provide income after a vital breadwinner died and to give families enough income so that children are not forced to quit school and go to work.

“Compensation is so important because so many families are suffering — many...

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Doctors Say Heart Drug Raised Risk of an Attack

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

Cardiologists have accused a small drug company of withholding data from a clinical trial showing that the company’s drug, meant to reduce the risk of heart attacks, increased the risk instead.

The cardiologists said that the company, Anthera Pharmaceuticals, did not turn over data to academic investigators, as it was required to do, for more than a year.

“Despite a contract that required transfer to the academic authors, the company stonewalled every attempt to acquire the data,” Dr. Steven Nissen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, said in an email on Tuesday.

Dr. Nissen was the senior author of a report on the data that was published online Monday by The Journal of the American Medical Association and presented at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association in Dallas. In unveiling the results there, the lead investigator, Dr. Stephen Nicholls, publicly admonished the company.

Dr. Colin Hislop, the chief medical officer at Anthera, denied the accusations, saying it simply took time to gather and organize the data. “I don’t think the timeline was particularly protracted, nor were we being difficult,” he said in an interview Tuesday.

Studies and lawsuits have shown that many clinical trial results, particularly negative ones, are not published. Critics say that hampers medical practice and violates an obligation to patients, who try experimental treatments in part to advance knowledge.

“We think that when you enter...

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FAA to Evaluate Obese Pilots for Sleep Disorder

Today's post was shared by FairWarning and comes from online.wsj.com

Concern about the U.S. obesity epidemic has now moved into airplane cockpits, prompting the Federal Aviation Administration to enhance medical scrutiny of overweight commercial and private pilots susceptible to sleep disorders.
After laying the groundwork with months of public education efforts, the FAA on Wednesday confirmed it plans to implement a new policy requiring special screening of pilots with excess weight or other factors that increase their risk of suffering from sleep apnea. To maintain their licenses, those aviators will have to be evaluated by a physician who is a sleep specialist.
The FAA eventually also plans to expand the effort to identify air-traffic controllers at greater risk for sleep apnea.
Once a pilot has been diagnosed with the condition—marked by sleep deprivation that causes daytime fatigue—he or she will have to undergo treatment before getting approval to return to the controls.
In a statement, the FAA said the updated guidelines to physicians are designed to help pilots and boost aviation safety "by improving the diagnosis of unrecognized or untreated" forms of the sleep disorder.
For private or weekend pilots especially, the impact could be dramatic. In 2011, the FAA identified about 125,000 pilots who were considered obese, making them potential candidates for testing under an expanded policy, according to the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, the largest national membership organization representing private aviators. There...

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Walmart Protests Promised To Be Even Bigger This Black Friday

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

Walmart workers and their supporters are planning to kick off this year's holiday shopping season with protests at 1,500 Walmart stores around the country on Nov. 29. Advocates for Walmart workers hope to use Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, to draw attention to what they describe as low wages and retaliation against employees who criticize the company.
Protestors are hoping for an even better turnout than last year, when hundreds of Walmart workers walked off the job in 46 states on Black Friday, according to OUR Walmart, a group advocating for Walmart workers. Protests have already occurred in multiple cities this month -- most notably in Los Angeles, where more than 50 Walmart workers and supporters were arrested in what organizers described as the largest single act of civil disobedience in the retailer’s history.
"We do expect [the protests] to be larger than last year because we have so many more members and so much more community support,” said Dan Schadelman, campaign director for Making a Change at Walmart, another advocacy group focusing on the rights of Walmart workers, in a conference call Thursday. "We're at an exciting moment, the movement of low-wage workers has taken off in 2013."
Making a Change at Walmart is seeking an end to alleged retaliation against workers, as well as to win full-time work and $25,000 per year for those who seek it.
Walmart, which made $17 billion in profit last year, is facing...

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Monday, November 25, 2013

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Sunday, November 24, 2013

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