TN, Memphis: After 34 years of service and 10 months in hospital, city and comp insurer throwing this sanitation workers life away

*NOTE: The city of Memphis may be the Workman’s Compensation insurance carrier, I am assuming that they are 2 separate entities.

FAST FACTS:

• Memphis sanitation worker Carl Johnson hurt last year when garbage truck backs over him
• Johnson spends 10 months in hospital and faces more operations and rehab
• Johnson says city alerted him it plans to drop Johnson from payroll and cut off medical benefits

Life sucks, you bust your ass to feed the family, you do it year after year, obviously your a good worker, you made it for 34 years without getting terminated. You are a good employee and in this era when ill informed people talk about unions being a thing of the past they highlight how ‘good’ employers have become.

For Carl Johnson, who was the breadwinner for his family and taking care of his disabled mother, he didn’t deserve what happened. They call them accidents for a reason, Carl was behind a truck driven by a rookie driver, who mistakingly ran it in reverse and according to Carl, “The truck hit me here and crushed my pelvis and stuff.”

Carl Johnson was severely injured, so severe in fact that he would spend the next 10 months of his life in a hospital.

It seems that the Johnson family left the matter in the hands of the insurance company and the City of Memphis, BIG MISTAKE, because when Carl returned home on April 1st., he got a letter from the insurance company explaining as Carl puts it “They said you will be dropped from workman’s comp and receive your last paycheck May 10th.”, to make matters even worse Memphis city has a policy that states no employee can be off a city job longer than 12 consecutive months due to disability from a job related illness.

So now Carl is now without Workman’s Comp, without his jobs medical benefits and without income. This man broke his ass for his city, didn’t get legal council because he left it to fate that the right thing would be done and is disabled! What is going on in Memphis? Why is Carl in this predicament? Why is any tax paying American worker ever screwed into a situation like this? According to the city, Mr.Johnson can apply for Long Term Disability and Social Security, which Carl says ($1,300) wouldn’t even put a dent in his medical bills.

Lisa, Carl’s sister, in speaking of others who have wound up in similar situations in Memphis, states “I feel like they should have and could have done more for them, just as he did for them.”. The Johnson family has now hired legal council for help and to hopefully help others, by having Carl’s case serve as an example of changes needed.

I hope it helps, no worker should ever be in the bind that Carl is in, it makes you feel as if the insurance company wished he died. What a savage race we are, the corporate greed is immeasurable and the city bureaucracy is appalling. The same way the Johnson family is being screwed is the same way it can happen to any one of us.

Source for information: Injured City Sanitation Worker Says City Throwing Him to the Curb News 3 (5/13/08)

Doctors come forward to Congress explaining how they are coerced to mistreat and under treat injured workers

Wow, it’s about time, while there are some who screw the system, the majority of workplace injuries are sincere

A group representing 5,000 doctors, some who treat workers referred by employers and others working directly for companies, has come forward to speak out. According to Dr. Robert McLellan, president of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine “Our members feel they are being methodically pressured … to under-treat and mistreat,” and adds “…This is a grave ethical concern for our members. It’s a grave medical concern.”.

I couldn’t agree more, when I worked in a warehouse, the “company’ got a new doctor for workplace injuries, the first red flag was that he had a Doberman pinscher in his office, the second was when he sent a fella back to work with a broken leg. It’s about time.

From The Charlotte Observer (4/19/08) :

Doctors feel push to downplay injuries
by Ames Alexander aalexander@charlotteobserver.com

Group tells OSHA of pressure by companies
NEW YORK -A leading group of occupational doctors is taking the unusual step of speaking out publicly against pressure from companies to downplay workplace injuries.

To outline their concerns, the physicians have sent a letter to federal workplace safety regulators and held a conference session in New York City on Monday. They’re also planning to testify before Congress.

If successful, their campaign could affect the treatment of injured workers and might help change how the government assesses workplace safety.

“Our members feel they are being methodically pressured … to under-treat and mistreat,” said Dr. Robert McLellan, president of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. “…This is a grave ethical concern for our members. It’s a grave medical concern.”

His group represents 5,000 doctors; some treat workers referred to them by employers, while others work directly for companies.

Employers are supposed to record all injuries requiring time off work or medical treatment beyond first aid. It’s an honor system, and the injury logs are used by regulators and others to gauge plant safety. Low injury rates allow companies to avoid scrutiny from workplace safety regulators and may help managers earn four-figure bonuses.

In a hotel meeting room in New York, doctors said this helps explain why some employers urge them not to treat injuries in a way that would make them reportable. A cut, for instance, must be recorded if the worker gets stitches, one doctor told the room of more than 60 colleagues. But if the doctor simply covers the cut with a bandage, it doesn’t have to be reported.

Workplace injury and illness rates — a key factor in determining whether regulators inspect a company — have been declining nationwide in recent years. But some experts suspect that’s partly because employers aren’t reporting all on-the-job injuries.

McLellan, an associate professor at Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire, says he thinks employers are “vastly underreporting” the extent of workplace injuries.

“Players in the system may willfully produce records that don’t reflect reality,” he said in an interview.

He said he grew more concerned about corporate pressures on doctors in September, during a conference in the Carolinas. Since then, he said, he has heard from dozens of doctors.

That led him to contact the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and he expects to discuss his concerns with top agency officials next month. His group will likely propose that OSHA more vigorously investigate the accuracy of company injury logs. It may also ask regulators to rely on a broader array of workplace safety measures — and to rewrite rules so that companies have fewer incentives to underreport.

McLellan also wants occupational doctors to testify before congressional committees examining workplace safety.

Ethical physicians sometimes lose business to those who bend to the wishes of employers, some doctors and workers’ compensation lawyers say.

In the Carolinas and some other states, injured workers generally must visit doctors approved by their employers if they want workers’ compensation to pay for the treatment. Companies incur higher costs for compensating workers for medical care and lost wages when they’re injured on the job.

Employers tend to send workers to doctors who can help them keep costs low and productivity high, according to attorneys who represent injured workers. Doctors become popular with companies if they rarely order time off work for injured employees, or if they seldom recommend costly treatments or conclude injuries are work-related, those lawyers say.

“If you get past the infirmary and sent to a doctor, you’re getting sent to a doctor that lives on the plant,” said lawyer David Davila, who until recently worked in Columbia, S.C.

Atlanta lawyer Bruce Carraway has represented more than 400 injured poultry workers and says that in more than half of those cases, independent physicians gave different assessments than the company doctors.

Dr. Josephus Bloem, an orthopedic surgeon from Rocky Mount, said he used to get referrals from Perdue Farms. But in the 1990s, the company became unhappy that he usually recommended surgery for workers with carpal tunnel syndrome.

“Their top doctor once visited me and complained that I was too expensive, which I took as pressure to review my approach,” Bloem said. Not long afterward, the referrals stopped.

Dr. Roger Merrill, Perdue’s chief medical officer, said the company had discovered that many workers who got less invasive treatment — such as splinting, exercise and ibuprofen — fared better than those who got surgery. “We had a better way to treat folks,” he said.

But Bloem wondered whether health concerns were the only factor. “In the end,” he said, “the money wins.”

In their quest to keep injuries off logs, company officials without medical training sometimes provide inappropriate treatment, doctors at the New York conference said.

Dr. Peggy Geimer, corporate medical director for a chemical company in Connecticut, spoke of the “tremendous amount of pressure” on company staff to provide treatment beyond their level of expertise.

She recalled how one supervisor dealt with an injured worker who spilled an acidic chemical on his arm: He applied potash, which is sometimes used to clean up chemical spills — unaware that it would only make the burn worse.

McLellan said he doesn’t recall his group ever before taking such a strong stance on the issue. As one doctor at Monday’s conference put it: “We need to treat the patient. Not the log.” — Staff Writers Karen Garloch and Franco Ordonez contributed.

The Charlotte Observer also adds at the bottom of the story a piece in which they speak about the poultry industry, in which they had an in depth investigation and report on about 2 months back, you can see more news on that in the related links below.

Many injuries unreported in poultry industry

In a recent investigation of working conditions in the poultry industry, the Observer found that many on-the-job injuries aren’t being reported.

One N.C. poultry company, House of Raeford Farms, has repeatedly failed to record injuries on government safety logs. The newspaper also found that some company first-aid attendants have prevented poultry workers from receiving care that would cost the company money.

House of Raeford says it follows the law, provides good care and strives to protect workers.

A record-keeping expert for the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration told the Observer that his agency is allowing employers nationwide to vastly underreport the number of workplace injuries. The true rate for some industries, including poultry processors, is likely two to three times higher than government numbers suggest, Bob Whitmore said.

Al Jazeera writes on safety in NY sweatshop construction industry

Other workers say they are discouraged from going to see a doctor when injured. “He tell my friend, if you go to the hospital, tell them you hurt your foot playing soccer,”

In deepest sympathy of the worker who fell to his death today, while trying to find news on the story, I stumbled across this piece from AlJazeera.net (4/7/08):

Workers pay price of NYC boom
By Kristen Saloomey in New York

Activists are concerned that many construction workers in New York do not know their rights

New Yorkers who live next to construction sites – and there are thousands of active sites in the city – have been a little uneasy lately.

A few weeks ago, a crane 60 metres long tipped over, crushing a nearby building and killing seven people.

Four of them were construction workers. *Three of them were just hanging out on a Saturday afternoon.

And it was not an isolated incident. There has been a string of highrise construction accidents in recent months, including two window washers who plunged more than 40 floors to what should have been certain death.

Miraculously, one survived.

Further victims

The fact is, on average one construction worker dies a week in New York City – and for every one killed many more are injured.

Latinos make up the largest, and fastest growing, group of victims, like “Juan”, 35, who fell and split his head open on the job three years ago.

Juan had been thrilled to make as much as $130 a day at building sites, enough to take care of himself and his wife and four children back in Mexico.

He could make more money and work fewer hours in construction than he did washing dishes.

Then he fell through a hole in the floor, landing on his back in the cement basement. He lost a lot of blood and was unconscious in the hospital for a week.

Most construction fatalities are the result of falls. Of the 43 incidents that took place in New York in 2006, almost half of them involved Latinos, according to the Department of Labour Statistics.

Fatalities rose 87 per cent that year, the most recent for which numbers are available.

Luzdary Giraldo, an outreach worker for the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, says the construction industry targets immigrants who do not speak English well.

“They know they don’t know about their rights. And they know they will do their job, regardless,” Giraldo told Al Jazeera.

“If confronted with dangerous conditions the worker will go and do [the work] because it is the only option he has.”

Immigrant issue

Undocumented workers are easy to find. Every morning they group along 69th street in Queens, at a community centre on Staten Island, and in many other New York neighbourhoods where recent immigrants live.

Contractors in vans or pick-up trucks drive up looking for cheap labour. Typically, the workers swarm and there is a brief period of negotiation, then a few men jump in and are whisked off to job sites.

They have been in high demand. Spending on construction climbed seven per cent in 2007 to $26.2 billion, according to the New York Building Congress, a trade organisation.

According to New York Construction Workers United, about 64 per cent of the city’s 250,000 construction workers are immigrants who do the vast majority of non-union work.

Basic security equipment like harnesses and – in Juan’s case – hard hats are often lacking from job sites.

Those who do receive safety equipment are often forced to pay for it themselves. Many are afraid to complain because they do not want to be blacklisted or risk being deported if they are illegal.

No rights

This man said many injured workers
are too afraid to seek medical help

After two week in the hospital, Juan’s boss showed up and took him home.

“He told me it was nothing, I should go back to work the next week,” Juan told Al Jazeera through an interpreter. He never went back.

Other workers say they are discouraged from going to see a doctor when injured.

“He tell my friend, if you go to the hospital, tell them you hurt your foot playing soccer,” one man told Al Jazeera.

The friend too was afraid to seek medical help.

Giraldo says even undocumented workers have rights in the US, but many do not know it.

The employer is required to pay for on-the-job injuries, and they may also qualify for workers compensation.

Juan remembers being alone in his apartment and barely having the strength to call his wife, two weeks after the accident.

He stayed in bed for months before hiring a lawyer to help him get compensation. He still suffers from dizzy spells, hearing loss and headaches.

Economic pressures

Contractors pick up workers for jobs every
day in New York’s Queens neighborhood

Three years later, he has been offered a one-time workers compensation settlement of $35,000, but he does not think it is enough.

He says his two brothers in Wisconsin have been supporting him and his family and he needs more money to pay for his children’s education, so they can have a better life in Mexico.

“Like everybody, I come to this country for economic reasons,” Juan said.

Now his wife is planning to spend $3,000 to be smuggled across the Mexican border so she can join him in New York and work as a domestic while a grandmother raises the children back home.

Juan has never met his six year-old son, who was born after he left Mexico.

The crane accident has prompted municipalities from cities such as Philadelphia to Dallas to review the regulations governing construction sites – and many have found them lacking.

Advocates like Giraldo feel more has to be done to ensure undocumented workers receive the same treatment as others.

“They are responsible for building the economy,” she said.

And one thing is clear after the March crane accident that killed seven people – dangerous construction sites can put the entire public at risk.

*6 workers, 1 pedestrian

North Carolina who was recently sued by Mexico for labor rights violations is at it again, coercing county employee out of Worker Compensation.

Not a labor friendly state by a long shot

North Carolina already has a law which prevents any government agency—state, county, or local—from negotiating with an organized group representing its employees. This prevents these agencies from engaging in business practices as they see fit, and it prevents workers from joining forces to protect their rights.

From my article at UnionReview (11-10-07): North Carolina Violates NAFTA ?? – Right to Freely Associate/Organize/Bargain Collectively

The ILO (International Labor Organisation) had filed a complaint in Oct.06 – and now (11-07) Mexico’s government has called for immediate answers to questions on the progress in gaining collective bargaining rights for public sector workers in the US state of North Carolina.

The US, Mexico, and Canada share the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), in which a side accord, the North American Agreement on Labour Cooperation (NAALC), is being used to challenge the lack of labor rights in North Carolina.

Now comes even more news from WVEC.Com(ABC local news in NC) on how bad being a civil servant in North Carolina can be:

Injured man fighting for workman’s comp
Reported by: Lindsey Roberts
Television Link

HERTFORD CO., NC – An employee for the county is fighting over worker’s compensation. He’s asked to remain anonymous.

“When I had the accident I could tell then I was hurt,” he said. “They x-rayed and said everything was going to be fine — it was just probably going to be sore a right good little while.”

He says he followed county policy and filled out an accident report, but the next day, he says he received a call from the county saying if he wanted to get paid, he’d have to file the claim on his personal insurance.

He says Hertford County never filed a worker’s compensation claim.”No, I have not seen one,” he said. “No, nothing but the little county form.”He added, “It’s just kind of frustrating knowing we are probably going to have to come out of pocket with the deductible after we were hurt on county property.”

Everett Thompson practices law in Elizabeth City, NC and handles personal injury and worker’s compensation cases. He says the laws are designed to protect the employee. That means if claims are filed, the employee pays no medical expenses.

“Worker’s compensation insurance rates are determined by the number of claims they have, so the more claims, the higher the rate, so it would be more expensive for the employer if they have more claims so they might want to encourage their employees not to file.”

That practice is illegal. (Read More)

Makes me glad I live in one of those bad old “forced-unionism state’s”, this comes on the heels of another story that the Charlotte Observer has been covering about a poultry meat packing plant in North Carolina that appears on paper to be safer than a toy store. Hey look below where NC stands on workers rights.