Following up on the workers' compensation issue

(Sorry it has taken me so long to get back to the blog--my day job as journalism professor at Ole Miss--super-intense now as a new semester gets underway--keeps getting in the way! In any case, here's a folo-up to my workers' compensation column)

My recent column on the pro-employer voting record of the Mississippi Workers' Compensation Commission has prompted a stir in the state. Mississippi claimants' attorneys are demanding a legislative investigation into the commission, one that was called for a year ago but which has been "in limbo" all that time, according to state House Insurance Committee Chairman Walter Robinson Jr., D-Bolton.

Robinson conceded to this writer that he is treading carefully on the issue, given the sharp divisions between those on the side of injured workers and those on the side of employers and insurance companies who'd just as soon do away with state-mandated workers' compensation! Isn't this the kind of thing we elect politicians to do? Take on those issues where the lines are sharply divided, and see on which side justice lies?

Over the past couple of weeks, I have received numerous letters from working people across the state of Mississippi who've been burned by the state's neanderthal attitude toward what is owed people who get injured on the job.

"An 80 percent overturn rate (the three-member commission's rate of overturning pro-employee court rulings) is a disgrace!" one writer wrote. "It is time to vote in a governor who appoints no more `pocket judges' owned by the greedy insurance companies."

"I was involved in an auto accident in 1979 and have an ongoing medical claim with the company," wrote another reader. "I know all too well the pitfalls of workers' comp in Mississippi. I do not believe the public has a clue what's going on."

"It is great to know that someone in Mississippi is paying attention to our pitiful workers' comp problems," said yet another. "In 2004, after suffering a work-related injury, I was told by my doctor I would never be able to return to work. I was devastated but thought `I have workers' comp. It will take care of me.' I was surprised to find that as soon as the doctor turned this notice into the workers' comp carrier, all payments stopped."

"Your article ... hit close to home," wrote a loving father. "My daughter's boyfriend works for a towing company and recently had an accident where he lodged a piece of steel in his eye. The boat captain carried him to the emergency room to have it removed. Last week, he received his paycheck (and) noticed it was very short. He called ... and was told that the towing company is not required to carry workman's comp insurance."

I'm going to follow this issue. Not only because it needs to be followed, but also because no one else is doing it. Where are the investigative media in this state? You know what? You could find the same compelling story in every single state in the South. I know my region, and I'll guarantee you it's a story not being covered anywhere in Dixie by mainstream media.

Injured workers in Mississippi have to fight for compensation

(Here is my latest entry, a column on workers' compensation and the pro-employer Workers' Compensation Commission in Mississippi. By the way, I'm back from my summer travels across the South--from Louisiana to Virginia and North Carolina to Florida and back to Mississippi--and will now be posting more frequently on this blog. You may have noticed the recent post on migrant workers in Singapore disappeared after a couple of days. The magazine In These Times plans to publish it in its September edition and prefers previously unpublished material. I'll have it back in LaborSouth soon after the edition comes out.)

OXFORD, Miss. – It has been 25 years since I wrote my first column about workers’ compensation in Mississippi, and as I sit down to write about it again I keep coming up with French expressions like “déjà vu” and “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (“the more things change, the more they stay the same”).

Just like in 1985, efforts to improve the lot of workers who are injured on the job are being thwarted by conservative politicians more familiar with corporate boardrooms than assembly lines. Just like in 1985, Mississippi ranks at or near the bottom of most indices in the way it treats injured workers and their families.

However, something has indeed changed: The lot of those workers is even worse than it was in 1985. In fact, according to Jackson plaintiffs’ attorney Roger K. Doolittle, it’s so bad that “this is unprecedented in Mississippi jurisprudence.”

How bad is it?

A year ago this month, the state House Insurance Committee held a hearing on findings in a study ordered by Doolittle that showed the three members of the state Workers’ Compensation Commission—Chairman Liles Williams, John Junkin, and Augustus Collins II (who recently stepped down)—siding decisively with the employer in most cases before them, particularly in reversals of administrative court decisions.

For example, 77 percent of the reversals of administrative judge rulings sought by Williams were in favor of the employer. For Junkin, 91 percent of the reversals were for the employer’s benefit. For Collins, 75 percent were for the employer.

Although the committee discussed the possibility of a state investigation into the commission and its actions, House Insurance Committee Chairman Walter Robinson of Bolton told me recently that such an investigation is “still in limbo.”

“You’ve got judges that collectively have the highest experience rate in the history of the (workers compensation) act, and they are being reversed at the rate of about 80 percent,” Doolittle said, referring to reversals of decisions favoring the employee. “What they want is for people like me to stop representing poor people.”

Jackson attorney John Jones agrees with Doolittle’s findings. “I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and I’ve never seen a commission this conservative. … The irony is that by statute and by history, (workers compensation) is supposed to be tilted toward the worker. The worker is supposed to get the benefit of all doubt.”

Not in Mississippi, the last state in the nation to adopt a workers’ compensation law and perennially among the bottom feeders among states in what it pays injured workers or their families in cases of death. Statistics can be hard to find, but some 80 workers in Mississippi died in work-related injuries in 2008. Jones estimates approximately 13,000 workers were injured on the job every year, and many more may go unreported.

State Workers’ Compensation Commission Chairman Williams, whose first six-year term ends in December, said Doolittle’s numbers are misleading because they don’t include affirmations of court rulings that would present a more balanced picture. Even so, his own numbers show a pro-employer tilt: 59 percent of cases for the employer, 41 percent for the employee.

“I don’t think it is accurate to say we are biased,” said Williams, a veteran political figure in Mississippi and former vice president of the Stuart C. Irby Co. in Jackson. “We objectively make what we believe is the right decision based on the law.”

For Jackson attorneys Lance Stevens and Rogen Chhabra, the problems is the makeup of the commission itself, all gubernatorial appointees, none of whom had prior workers’ compensation experience. Due to the complexity of workers’ compensation law, “I would prefer that all three commissioners were lawyers,” Stevens said.

Jaribu Hill, executive director of the Greenville-based Mississippi Workers’ Center for Human Rights, said that “more of a fair and even playing field” is needed for workers in Mississippi, something the state Legislature and other political leaders need to recognize. “We go back every year to the same well to draw water. It’s frustrating and demoralizing. People are not willing to move an inch. We’re not even talking about a mile.”

Déjà vu.

Imperial Sugar pays fines, workers protest McConnell, and a labor professor fights for his job

A quick look at some of the labor and worker-related activity around the South gives us another indication that more and more people are standing up for their rights, and that a movement is underway despite the blanket of silence many in the media maintain.

IMPERIAL SUGAR IN SAVANNAH
The 2008 explosion at the Imperial Sugar Co. plant in Savannah that killed 14 people has finally resulted in a settlement. The company will pay $6 million in fines. The sum could have been much higher, and the company has not admitted to any liability. The federal fines were levied for multiple safety violations.

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration found more than 100 violations at company plants in Georgia and Louisiana.

The company still faces

WORKERS PROTEST SENATOR MCCONNELL
U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's stand against extending jobless aid prompted a protest outside his office in Louisville, Ky., earlier this month. McConnell led a Republican assault on the proposed extension despite the fact that more than 1.7 million have lost their unemployment benefits since June 1.

The Kentucky AFL-CIO led the protest against the veteran Kentucky Republican and demanded that he stand up for working people who are simply trying to survive the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Senate Democrats this week were able to overcome the McConnell-led Republican filibuster and set the stage for renewed benefits for hard-pressed workers who've lost their jobs.

A PRO-LABOR PROFESSOR IN ALABAMA FIGHTS FOR HIS JOB
Labor historian Glenn Feldman at the University of Alabama in Birmingham says that pro-business forces at his university are trying to get rid of them, and he has filed two lawsuits to make sure they don't get away with it.

Feldman, who established a chapter of the American Association of University Professors at the university and ran a training center there as well, has filed a faculty grievance and a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The university no longer supports his training center.

Helping him in his cause are members of the United Steelworkers.

Migrant workers need respect as well as basic civil rights

(Here is a first report from my travels thus far this summer across the South. The travels started in Mamou, La., where the tensions from the BP oil spill are clearly evident among the oil rig workers who live in south Louisiana. They've even put an edge on the Saturday morning partyers at the famous Cajun haunt, Fred's Lounge. One local denizen barked this at my daughter: "Tell people where you came from that we don't need their help down here. We can handle this ourselves."

More recently, I traveled across the South's northern rim, to the mountainous point where Tennessee, Virgina, and North Carolina meet, and finally to the tobacco fields of central North Carolina, from which I filed the column below. Next I'll be heading to Florida, where I hope to speak with activists from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.)

In the photo above and to the left, you see Diego Reyes Jr. (on the left) and Diego Reyes Sr. (on the right) in the latter's trailer, described in the column below.

SANFORD, N.C. – Getting to the rusted-out trailer that Diego Reyes Sr. and five other Latino workers call home between June and November of each year was no simple task.

I grew up in North Carolina’s tobacco country, but I’d never been here. Taking a right turn off Barbecue Church Road, Reyes and his son Diego Reyes Jr. led me down a rutted, one-way dirt road, past corn fields and bean fields, and along the narrow levee of a lonely pond until we reached it, between a field and a thicket of woods.

They invited me inside, where several fans hummed noisily against the summer heat. Reyes Sr., 45, speaks no English, but he made sure his 21-year-old son learned it, and now Junior is a seminarian who works with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), devoting his life to improving the lot of migrant workers who toil long hours for minimal wages with little or no protection from exploitation, live in substandard housing, and face daily discrimination.

“It’s not only Sanford, but everywhere, all this propaganda against immigrants,” Reyes Jr. said. “People feel they’re stealing their jobs, that immigrants are bad people, drug mules, and criminals. It dehumanizes people.”

He pointed to the Arizona law that allows the police to stop immigrants on the street without provocation and demand their papers. Now politicians in Mississippi, despite its long and tawdry history of ill treatment of minorities, want the state to adopt such a law.

“It’s not the stealing of jobs” that brought migrants here, Reyes Jr. insists. “The people came here because of the policies the U.S. implemented in the world.”

Reyes Sr., whose dark, sunburned skin and muscular arms attest to his years in the fields. is living proof of the impact of those policies.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1994 allowed the United States to flood Mexico with subsidized corn that at times sold for 30 percent below the cost of production. More than two million Mexican farmers lost their jobs as a result. Reyes Sr. was one of them, and he, like so many others, had to go north to find work to support his wife and 11 children.

Every year, as part of the H2A guest worker program, he comes to harvest tobacco, beans and corn.

Farm workers need “respect,” Reyes Sr. said. Veterans like himself work for years and help train younger workers but earn the same as someone who has just arrived, $7.25 an hour. That’s just one of many reasons why he and others in North Carolina and elsewhere have joined FLOC, which has a long record of success in winning contracts with major corporations and which is now battling the Winston-Salem-based R.J. Reynolds Tobacco company to get it to recognize the need to improve the lives of both farmers and workers.

“When the grower sees you are a union member, they respect you more,” Reyes Sr. said. “They give you breaks—some workers get no breaks during the day. You get better treatment, more respect.”

Respect for workers, particularly immigrants, can be a hard commodity to find. Witness the hundreds at Howard Industries in Laurel who were arrested in August 2008 and held in a Louisiana camp for weeks without formal charges or the ability to see an attorney.

The Rev. Carlton Eversley of Winston-Salem, an African-American activist who sees immigrant rights as a civil rights issue, said he’ll never forget the migrant labor camp in Wilson, N.C., that he and other religious leaders visited in late 2009. “It was mind-boggling, 125 guys in wooden barracks, seven guys in a room with no windows, no ventilation, no linen, no bed sheets, no closets, very hot, very unsanitary, swarms of gnats. … You felt like you were leaving the United States and going to some kind of Third World situation.”

I had similar thoughts in the Reyes’ trailer, but what struck me even more was the Southern hospitality I found. As I left, Reyes Sr. motioned me over to a table by the woods. Under it were a half-dozen or more watermelons and cantaloupes. “Take one,” he said, and I picked a watermelon out. “Take another,” he insisted, “and some cantaloupes, too.” I declined. “This is enough,” I said, thanking him as I waved goodbye.

Traveling across the South to research the rising black-brown-white worker movement

I will be traveling to North Carolina this coming week to gather research on what I see as a growing movement in the U.S. South that brings together the civil rights and labor movements on behalf of immigrant workers and others among the lowest paid workers in our global economy. Indeed, this is part of a larger movement across the Global South, something I witnessed during my recent visit to Singapore.

These issues were at the heart of the recent U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, an extension of the World Social Forum and its call for increased activism on behalf of workers around the world. The Detroit meeting included black, Latino, Asian, and white activists.

North Carolina, the nation's least unionized state despite lingering perceptions of it as the South's most progressive state, has been the site of much activity in recent years. Most recent have been actions by the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) and the National Farm Worker Ministry to get Winston-Salem-based tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds to put pressure on growers to provide better working and living conditions for the 30,000-strong, mostly Latino workforce in the state's tobacco fields.

The Rev. Carlton Eversley, who attended the Detroit meeting and has been active in the labor action involving R.J. Reynolds, told me today in an interview that he and other religious/labor leaders visited a labor camp for migrant workers in Wilson, N.C., in August 2009 and were shocked by what they found.

"It's almost too difficult to describe. One hundred and twenty five guys in wooden barracks, seven guys in a room, no windows, no ventilation, no linen, no bedsheets, no closets, very hot, very unsanitary, swarms of gnats. You felt like these were conditions that should not exist in our state or our country. I felt like you were leaving the United States and going to some kind of Third World situation."

His comments were particularly striking for me, having just returned from Singapore, where very similar living conditions exist for the migrant workers there (I'll have a full report on this in the near future).

In southeast Asia, workers in the auto industries in China and India are standing up for their rights, demanding better wages, working conditions and union recognition. Garment workers have organized in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Groups like the Asia Floor Wage Alliance are calling for social justice and working hard to bring a spotlight to worker conditions.

In the U.S. South, FLOC, the National Farm Worker Ministry, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the Southern Faith, Labor and Community Alliance are doing similar good work.

I'll be traveling across the South in the next few days, particularly in North Carolina, to talk to workers and activists, and I'll be reporting back to this blog.

Global South - immigrant workers at the oil spill get carded, police raid striking Mexican miners, and a Chinese plant opens in South Carolina

Here's a round-up of recent labor news that puts the U.S. South directly in the middle of the Global South:

IMMIGRANT WORKERS IN LOUISIANA
The British Petroleum oil spill that is threatening the entire Gulf Coast and beyond has now entered the national debate over immigration and undocumented workers.

At the request of St. Bernard Parish Sheriff Jack Stephens, officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement interviewed immigrant workers at oil spill command centers in Louisiana, checking their documentation and status, recalling the same kind of paranoia that led the state of Arizona recently to adopt one of the nation's harshest anti-immigrant laws.

Stephens said he called in ICE out of fear that criminal elements had come into the area along with the workers now involved in the cleanup. However, immigrant rights advocates say officials like Stephens are doing the same kind stereotyping that is going on in Arizona, where police now can stop any immigrant without reason or provocation to check for legal status.

IN MEXICO JUST SOUTH OF THE BORDER
Across the border in Mexico, workers are fighting another kind of battle. Federal police officers this month swarmed into the open-pit Cananea copper mine just 25 miles south of the Arizona border to bring an end to a three-year-old strike by more than 1,000 miners. The police action against the strike, as reported previously in this blog, was anticipated by many who see the current government as engaged in a campaign to destroy independent unions in Mexico.

CHINA AND SOUTH CAROLINA
Around the world, workers are beginning to stand up for their rights in the workplace. Chinese workers at Honda plants in Guangdong province have effectively shut down the Japanese company's operations there, striking for better wages. What's more they're getting a discreet nod of approval from the Chinese government, which is growing weary of international companies that exploit workers and resources for their own bottom line.

Ironically, Chinese companies are showing increasing interest in opening up foreign plants of their own--and guess where? The U.S. South.

The Yuncheng company, which has three plants in Dongguan in southern China (the industrial city and region so vividly described in Leslie T. Chang's compelling new book, Factory Girls), now operates a plant in Spartanburg, S.C., where workers manufacture cylinders for use in bottle labeling.

Yuncheng was lured to Spartanburg by the cheap cost of land--6.5 acres cost it a mere $350,000, just 25 percent of the cost of a similar parcel back home in China. Other expenses such as electricity are also cheaper.

Of course, U.S. workers earn 10 to 15 times what Chinese workers earn, but South Carolina offers a payroll tax credit that will enable Yuncheng to absorb the extra labor costs and still make a good profit.

According to Fortune magazine, Yuncheng is just one example of China's growing investment in the U.S. The Tianjin Pipe Group is planning a $1 billion plant--the biggest Chinese plant ever in the U.S.--in Corpus Christi, Texas. The plant will produce pipe used in oil drilling.

Is the U.S. South looking more and more like one of those so-called "Third World" countries that once lured our textile plants away?

On the road to Singapore--investors, immigrant workers, and a curious journalist

(The photo you see here is one of men playing what one local called "Dam", a form of checkers, in Singapore's Chinatown. The photo was taken by Suzanne Centenio Atkins.)

SINGAPORE – Taxi driver Abo Rhaman B Abo Samad sees himself as an “ambassador” for this city-nation, an economic powerhouse in Southeast Asia yet something less than a full-scale democracy.

And he’s not shy about offering his opinions to the Americans in the back seat. “Lots of foreigners come here to work. Everybody has a job if you’re not too choosy. I was a security guard making eight hundred to nine hundred (Singapore) dollars salary. I had to upgrade myself. Now I make four thousand a month (roughly $3,000).”

Abo gives credit for that upward mobility to the half-century rule of the People’s Action Party (PAP) and to Lee Kuan Yew, the founder and longtime ruler of modern-day Singapore who, though officially retired at 86, is still very active as its “Minister Mentor”. “He’s a smart man, a swell leader, a great leader. We have nothing, no natural resources. This man took us out of nothing.”

Over the two weeks I recently spent in this fascinating city of five million, I found that not everyone agrees, but with its pulsating, people-filled streets, towering skyscrapers, and busy ethnic enclaves of Buddhist and Hindu temples, Moslem mosques, vendor and shophouse-lined alleyways, Singapore is still undeniably one of the Pacific Rim’s economic “tigers”. It’s Asia’s cleanest and least corrupt city, even though its colonial past still lingers in places like the Raffles Hotel, where writer William Somerset Maugham plotted his exotic stories about lonely expatriates and spell-casting natives.

Singapore seems an isle of tranquility in a trouble-filled region. While I was there, the streets of Bangkok turned red with blood as Red Shirt protesters raged against the government. North and South Korea rattled sabers over the sinking of a South Korean warship. Worker suicides and bizarre attacks on children and women revealed the dark underside to China’s economic boom.

Singapore is not immune, however. During my visit, Indonesian police raided a terrorist hideout in Jakarta and found plans indicating that one of the subway stops I used everyday was a bombing target.

The immigrant worker issue that seems universal today—from China to Mississippi—is also a major topic of conversation here in this nation founded by immigrants. A half-million workers from Bangladesh, India, and elsewhere do the backbreaking work of this city. Many are huddled into crowded, rat-infested dormitories with little relief from the sweltering tropical heat, reliving the conditions that faced the 19th century immigrants depicted in Chinatown’s Chinese Heritage Centre.

“The government keeps raising taxes, putting pressure on people, particularly small businessmen,” a convenience store owner in western Singapore told me. “You have to work very hard to make it. You have to get up early and go to bed late. People are scared to speak up. Even the rich are scared to say anything or they will lose what they have.”

Singapore slaps hefty taxes on convenience store “sin” items like alcohol and horrific depictions of cancer-ridden smokers on cigarette packs, but the tax structure works quite well for the wealthy, who pay in income taxes just half what their U.S. counterparts pay. The city offers public health care but few other benefits to residents. Wages are low even though profits are high.

This is the city where American Michael Fay was famously caned for theft and vandalism in 1994. The Singapore Police are notoriously tough. No jaywalking, and no eating and drinking in the subways. Graffiti artists face up to three years in prison--plus the cane--if they get caught.

The pages of the Straights Times—the city’s leading newspaper--are thick with stories and advertisements. The business news is top-notch, so is foreign coverage. The feature stories can be excellent, such as the one about karaoke lounge hostess Li Hong Yan. The Chinese immigrant’s naked body was found floating in the bungalow swimming pool of a wealthy businessman.

Yet criticism of the government is practically nonexistent. The press practices what the Chinese call kiatsu, self-censorship. When one of modern Singapore’s founders, Goh Keng Swee, died during my stay, a daily flood of hagiography followed. Ang Peng Hwa, who heads the journalism program at Nanyang Technological University, says Singaporean journalists rarely do investigative reporting. “Singapore is so small. Everyone knows everybody, and you’d see that person you investigated on the street the next day.”

Well, taxi driver Abo asks, who needs critics of Singapore anyway? “They are stupid. They haven’t been to Myanmar (Burma), or to Thailand where they are fighting.”