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Our current workers’ compensation system is unfair and provides inadequate benefits to injured workers. Yet, it’s much better than the newest proposal pushed by corporate lobbyists – an opt out system.
Workers’ compensation protections are under constant threat from corporate lobbyists. In Alabama, lobbyists have regularly pushed legislative proposals to cut-off medical and disability benefits after arbitrary periods of time. And, insurance interests have worked overtime to prevent the legislature from raising a cap placed on partial disability benefits decades ago.
One new threat is the “opt out” system enacted in Texas and Oklahoma. In that system, large companies can basically opt out of a state workers’ compensation system and write their own plans. In other words, employers can write their own rules. In practice, opt out systems allow arbitrary plans that do not value injured workers.
An opt out system is a return to the working wasteland of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle where people are expendable. Like a line from the novel, workers are given little value:
They had got the best out of him – they had worn him out, with their speeding-up and their carelessness, and now they had thrown him away.
This is where an opt out system will lead us. The authors of this system are now lobbying states beyond Texas and Oklahoma. Hopefully, we will never allow this system in Alabama. ProPublica explored the impact of opt out plans on working men and women suffering from work-related accidents and injuries. The real life stories detailed by ProPublica paint a disturbing picture.
What benefit changes can injured workers expect if employers write their own plans? Here are a few examples of harmful plan limits created by companies writing their own plans:
Compensation for work-related accidents is important for working families and the communities in which they live. Our benefit system is under constant attack by large employers and insurance carriers who wish to shift the costs of injuries from themselves to impacted families and the government. It is important that we protect working families by preventing the expansion of an opt out system into Alabama.