While most of the Sacramento crowd looks to the last two months of the year as a time to get away from it all, the gnomes at the Commission on Health and Safety and Workers’ Compensation (CHSWC) are busy in their Oakland workshop coming up with new and exciting ways to confound California workers’ comp policymakers.
In hearings this month and December, the Commission staff will be coordinating discussions on return to work and 24-hour coverage. From that will emanate additional reports, likely for the Commission to adopt in January, when, one hopes — and we say that with genuine hope and optimism — there will be two new employer representatives appointed by Gov. Schwarzenegger to cast a more cautious eye on the work product of this entity.
It is difficult to measure the effect the Commission has had on workers’ compensation policy issues since it became an integral part of the decision-making process by the majority in the legislature. But clearly it has allowed labor to take a more custodial approach to the system and, in so doing, be a catalyst for reform that heretofore was unprecedented.
In its early years, the Commission could claim similar engagement by the employer representatives. But that has trailed off in an unfortunate display of partisanship that calls into serious question the appointment process created in a compromise in the 1993 reforms. There is a better way to effect these appointments, and that labor and employers are willing to continue with the concept of a commission where stakeholders can take control over the system should serve as a signal to legislative leadership that perhaps things should be done better and more fairly.
To the extent there is a substantial review of workers’ compensation issues in 2007, and there is a strong likelihood that there will not be such a review, reconsideration of a number of elements of the management of this system is in order. The legislature should make certain that the oversight role of the Commission is executed in a way that truly reflects the necessary give and take between labor and employers that has been the hallmark of this system since its inception.
The Commission, in turn, should be independent of the Department of Industrial Relations and should be accountable only to the legislature. The Commission members should be appointed by the governor. The labor representatives should be nominated by labor organizations and the employer representatives by employer organizations. The self-insureds need to be included. There is precedence for this in the appointments of the labor and employer representatives to the governing committee of a licensed workers’ compensation insurance rating organization, in case anyone was wondering whether this modest proposal was spun entirely out of whole cloth.
Until the appointment process for Commission members is reformed, the work product of the Commission is going to be viewed with suspicion by the business community. That should not be a dynamic that anyone who truly is concerned about the system covets.
The Commission is not going to let its research and policy agenda sit idly by awaiting such a change. Once again, we can expect a variety of recommendations and commentary, both public and private, which legislators who have commissioned these works will rely on. Once again, we can expect bill analyses that will cite that the amendments being proposed are from the Commission, as though that imprimatur means that the true stakeholders in the system have embraced its contents when they have not.
Once again, we can anticipate that business representatives will oppose the Commission recommendations, calling into question how representative that body currently is of business and labor.
If there is truly a commitment to foster a labor-management dialogue on workers’ compensation issues, then that commitment, first claimed by the legislature in 1993, needs to be fulfilled before yet another series of reports find their way into the Capitol.