For years, large employers like Walmart have lobbied to cut back workers’ compensation, maximizing their income whereas pushing all of the dangers onto their workforce. Workers are routinely denied their employees’ comp claims and both understand or don’t that they’ll combat to get these advantages. It then turns into a matter of time and assets, one thing that employers normally have much more of than their staff.
COVID-19 exposes one of many nice loopholes in employees’ compensation claims: viruses may be caught exterior of labor. The instance the Intercept provides is that issues like black lung disease are really only caught by coal miners, whereas firms have been capable of efficiently solid doubt on what can and can’t be coated. Working in a hospital and catching the flu just isn’t one thing coated by employees’ compensation advantages. And whereas some provisions have been put forth to ensure COVID-19-work-related infections are covered by workers’ compensation, the fact of that is as convoluted as you may think.
Kaiser Well being Information reported on the tragic case of 51-year-old James Anderson, a married father of two babies, who contracted and died of COVID-19 in April. His job was to interchange air filters in COVID sufferers’ rooms at a hospital in suburban Pennsylvania. Whereas his household mourned and tried to determine what to do subsequent, they had been denied his employees’ compensation dying advantages by St. Mary Medical Heart—an allegation they deny, however are nonetheless being sued for. Anderson labored at St. Mary’s Medical Center for 23 years.
And all of this doesn’t have in mind that there’s ample evidence that for some individuals COVID-19 just isn’t one thing you recover from after a number of days or even weeks. COVID-19’s long-term well being ramifications are simply starting to be seen, and add one other, bigger layer to what’s anticipated from labor, of the employers who revenue off of their labor. Mix this with an insurance coverage business that makes most of its cash by determining methods to not pay out insurance coverage claims, and now we have a recipe for much more financial misery for common People.
