Thread: WAITING IN PAIN

Nightmare for many injured workers: The boss with no insurance
Posted by LCraven April 08, 2008 01:52AM
WAITING IN PAIN: Last of three parts

Each year, thousands of New Jersey workers get hurt on the job and discover a frightening and potentially expensive fact: Their employer ignored the law that requires businesses to have insurance for work-related injuries.

It is a problem that represents a small but growing slice of the state's litigious, politically tainted $1.8 billion-a-year workers' compensation system.


Officials acknowledge that uninsured workers ultimately can burden hospitals, charities and other social agencies. But a Star-Ledger examination found they are doing little to combat the issue. Among the findings:

- An uninsured worker who files a claim for benefits faces a complicated, onerous court system where one in 10 such claims drags for five years. Lawyers openly say they are reluctant to take cases involving the uninsured because they and their clients rarely get paid.

- State officials cannot say how deep or serious the backlog is, because they haven't tracked the outcome of more than 10,000 cases in the past seven years.

- Of those who apply to a state fund established 20 years ago to help pay for medical treatment and benefits for the uninsured, only about 1 percent receive money, and officials admit they cannot afford to pay for the most serious and debilitating injuries.

- State audits of employers turn up more than 25,000 employees without workers' comp insurance each year, but the state is spending less time and resources finding and punishing violators.

WAITING IN PAIN:
Read the series

All this occurs as officials acknowledge roughly two-thirds of New Jersey businesses caught breaking the law end up as repeat offenders, deciding it is less burdensome to ignore the regulation and take their chances.

"If they do get caught, they attribute it to the cost of doing business," said Bill Burns, assistant director of audits and field investigations for the state Department of Labor and Workforce Development.

For workers like Jose Gualberto, the costs run deeper.

GETTING AROUND THE SYSTEM

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The problem here is allowing people and businesses to choose WHICH laws they want to follow and which laws they don't want to follow.

It is against the law to hire illegal aliens, but it's not enforced.

It it against the law to be an illegal alien, again, not enforced.

The law states employers must pay into workers comp. Employers have already violated the law by hiring illegal aliens, what's another broken law?

Enforce the laws or suffer the consequences America!

miguelina,

"Enforce the laws or suffer the consequences America!"

Perhaps, suffer the consequences and enforce the law America! We did not get here overnight. Pain comes with apathy, complacency, and corruption.

Bill Clinton left Washington as a shining star, Alan Greenspan left the Fed as a celebrity, Ronald Reagan done the same. If history gets the chance to record the truth, what will be told?

Those who have been marginalized and ridiculed as being out of step, yet continued the good fight and worked hard have been forgotten.

Go Ron Paul!