Monday, September 1, 2014
The high cost of labor efficiency — and the ‘Good Jobs’ alternative
Court OKs workers' comp for kickball injury
Todays post is shared from blufftontoday.com
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| A man who was severely injured during the company kickball game he organized is entitled to workers’ compensation, the S.C. Supreme Court has ruled. The justices reversed the Court of Appeals and the state workers’ comp panel in a Wednesday decision. During a company-sponsored kickball game in 2007, Stephen Whigham jumped and landed awkwardly on his right leg, shattering his tibia and fibula. “He was taken away in an ambulance and eventually underwent two surgeries. His doctor later informed him he would need a knee replacement in the near future,” according to Wednesday’s decision. Whigham was the director of creative solutions at Jackson Dawson Communications in Greenville, described in court records as a marketing, advertising and public relations company. During a meeting with other company leaders, Whigham came up with the idea of having a company kickball game as a team-building activity, and his superior at the company approved it. Supplies cost the company $440. The event was called “Ballad Ball” and “paid tribute to the rock ballads of the 80s,” according to court records. In its decision Wednesday, the Supreme Court focused on whether Whigham’s employer expected him to attend the game. When asked if he would have considered it irresponsible of him not to show up, his boss replied: “I don’t know. I would have thought—he wouldn’t do... |
GM ignition switch compensation program receives more than 300 claims, including 107 death-related
| DETROIT, MI- The General Motors Co. ignition switch compensation program has received 309 claims through Monday, including 107 related to fatal accidents. Camille S. Biros, of Feinberg Rozen LLP, which is overseeing the program for the Detroit-based automaker, said payments to eligible victims and their families are expected to be finalized by the end of September. She said the number of claims filed has no correlation to the amount of individuals expected to be paid through the program, which could cost GM hundreds of millions of dollars. The voluntary compensation program was announced by GM and renowned compensation attorney Kenneth Feinberg in late-June. There is no financial cap on the program and everyone that meets stringent guidelines set by Feinberg are eligible for the program. Feinberg Rozen started accepting claims Aug. 1. It will continue accepting claims through Dec. 31. GM has linked the faulty ignition switches to at least 13 deaths and 54 crashes, but others, including victims' family members and lawyers, say the death toll is closer to 100. GM has said its numbers could increase based on Feinberg's findings because it only included those involved in front-end collisions. Kenneth Feinberg, the independent claims administrator for the GM Ignition Compensation Program, announces the details of the program, including eligibility, scope, rules for the program, and timing of submitting claims, during a news... |
Virginia: Delays in workers' comp system hold up treatments
| Today's post is shared from Hamptonroards.com The Virginia Workers' Compensation Commission is an independent state agency with 270 employees and an annual operating budget of nearly $45 million. Disputed cases are heard by one of the 21 deputy commissioners unless the parties agree to mediation. In 2013, "the average turnaround time from the time a case was referred to the hearing docket to the date the hearing was held was 150.9 days" or about five months, said James Szablewicz, who has served as chief deputy commissioner for the past decade. In most cases, the deputy commissioner is supposed to issue a ruling within 21 days of the hearing. After that, a worker or employer's representative may file an appeal to be heard by the three commissioners. The commissioners are considered the equivalent of civil court judges in Virginia. The General Assembly appoints them to renewable six-year terms. Virginia law does not set deadlines for hearings before deputy commissioners or commissioners. One way, however, that the commission expedites the process is to sometimes substitute an "on-the-record" decision for a hearing, Szablewicz said. In cases with smaller-scale disputes that... |
The Medicare Miracle
| Today's post is shared fromPaul Krugman of the nytemes.com So, what do you think about those Medicare numbers? What, you haven’t heard about them? Well, they haven’t been front-page news. But something remarkable has been happening on the health-spending front, and it should (but probably won’t) transform a lot of our political debate. The story so far: We’ve all seen projections of giant federal deficits over the next few decades, and there’s a whole industry devoted to issuing dire warnings about the budget and demanding cuts in Socialsecuritymedicareandmedicaid. Policy wonks have long known, however, that there’s no such program, and that health care, rather than retirement, was driving those scary projections. Why? Because, historically, health spending has grown much faster than G.D.P., and it was assumed that this trend would continue. But a funny thing has happened: Health spending has slowed sharply, and it’s already well below projections made just a few years ago. The falloff has been especially pronounced in Medicare, which is spending $1,000 less per beneficiary than the Congressional Budget Office projected just four years ago. This is a really big deal, in at least three ways. First, our supposed fiscal crisis has been postponed, perhaps indefinitely. The federal government is still running deficits, but they’re way down. True, the red ink is still likely to swell again in a few years, if only because more baby boomers will retire and start collecting benefits; but, these... |
More Workers Are Claiming ‘Wage Theft’
Today's post is shared from Steven Greenhouse at nytimes.com
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| Week after week, Guadalupe Rangel worked seven days straight, sometimes 11 hours a day, unloading dining room sets, trampolines, television stands and other imports from Asia that would soon be shipped to Walmart stores. Even though he often clocked 70 hours a week at the Schneider warehouse here, he was never paid time-and-a-half overtime, he said. And now, having joined a lawsuit involving hundreds of warehouse workers, Mr. Rangel stands to receive more than $20,000 in back pay as part of a recent $21 million legal settlement with Schneider, a national trucking company. “Sometimes I’d work 60, even 90 days in a row,” said Mr. Rangel, a soft-spoken immigrant from Mexico. “They never paid overtime.” The lawsuit is part of a flood of recent cases — brought in California and across the nation — that accuse employers of violating minimum wage and overtime laws, erasing work hours and wrongfully taking employees’ tips. Worker advocates call these practices “wage theft,” insisting it has become far too prevalent. Some federal and state officials agree. They assert that more companies are violating wage laws than ever before, pointing to the record number of enforcement actions they have pursued. They complain that more employers — perhaps motivated by fierce competition or a desire for higher profits — are flouting wage laws. Many business groups counter that government officials have... |
Labor Day: Wages and Salaries Still Lag as Corporate Profits Surge
| Today's post is shared from the nytimes.com In the months before Labor Day last year, job growth was so slow that economists said it would take until 2021 to replace the jobs that were lost or never created in the recession and its aftermath. The pace has picked up since then; at the current rate, missing jobs will be recovered by 2018. Still, five years into an economic recovery that has been notable for resurging corporate profits, the number and quality of jobs are still lagging badly, as are wages and salaries. In 2013, after-tax corporate profits as a share of the economy tied with their highest level on record (in 1965), while labor compensation as a share of the economy hit its lowest point since 1948. Wage growth since 1979 has not kept pace with productivity growth, resulting in falling or flat wages for most workers and big gains for corporate coffers, shareholders, executives and others at the top of the income ladder. Worse, the recent upturn in growth, even if sustained, will not necessarily lead to markedly improved living standards for most workers. That’s because the economy’s lopsidedness is not mainly the result of market forces, but of the lack of policies to ensure broader prosperity. The imbalance will not change without labor and economic reforms. For instance, new research from the Economic Policy Institute shows that from the first half of 2013 to the first half of 2014, hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, fell for nearly everyone. An exception was a small gain for the bottom 10... |
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