WHY WOULD ANY AMERICAN WANT TO LIVE THERE? Having been bloodied by the massacre in Charleston last week and the murder of black motorist in North Charleston a few weeks before, the legislature in South Carolina is considering ending workman’s compensation.
The goal seem to be to create a workforce on a par with workers in Vietnam and China.
The idea, in the name of the same “freedom” offered by the state’s right to work laws, is to make workers’ compensation optional. This doesn’t seem like a good idea to many who cite the importance of this system, as having coverage for situations if this arises (be they through https://www.icwgroup.com/workers-compensation/ or any other) protects not only the employees but also the morale and opinions of the employer.
A similar system in Oklahoma and Texas, replaces state insurance with employer choosing to pay for wage replacement and medical costs associated with work injuries using their own self-contained systems. While the safety of pooled funds in an insurance system would be lost, worker claimants would be barred from suing the employer in tort.
Brett Buchanan, spokesman for the business group sponsoring the bill, described it as a “high-benefit, low-liability” system.” He said he doesn’t expect to win over claimants’ attorneys or insurance companies, “Anybody who has financial interest in the workers’ comp system is probably going to be opposed to any changes in the comp system.”
In contrast the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce, is opposed. Its spokesman the idea makes him uneasy, something that would benefit large employers at the expense of small ones “(Small employers are) going to be staying in the workers’ comp system, but you’re going to have larger businesses that are going to opt out … so the question then is, if you pull 40 to 50% of workers out of the current system, what is going to be the consequences of that to the system? Are we pulling out employees that are less likely to be hurt on the job and therefore the pool of insured people is going to be a little higher risk in the voluntary market? And if that’s the case, then the end result might be something that is good for bigger businesses but might not be so good for the smaller businesses.”
A century ago, politicians hammered out a historic compromise between employers and workers: Workers would give up the right to sue employers for workplace injuries, and in return workers would get a no-fault system that guaranteed benefits, while employers got a defined benefit schedule in place of open-ended liability. This system has worked for over a hundred years. It sounds like South Carolina isn’t abandoning it, but rather is considering allowing large employers to self-insure instead of paying into a state pooled fund. If large employers indeed are subsidizing small businesses, it’s understandable they don’t want to continue doing that, and squawking from the businesses losing those subsidies is to be expected.
You are too much a lawyer and too smart to see this that way. The goal here is to turn the control over workman’s comp to the employer withut the right to sue. This si no different tha the “right to work” laws that undermine the right to organize.
Well, of course, employers everywhere in all states fight continuously against L&I benefits. To them, there’s no such thing as a legitimate workplace injury. But that isn’t new; it’s been going on for at least 150 years.
I do not think this is about what is and is not a workplace injury. It is about race to the bottom by South Carolina and Vietnam.