Duff: What COVID-19 Laid Naked| Staff Compensation Information

from Michael C. Duff

Friday, August 27, 2021 | 0

I am writing this post in Scorching Saint Louis, where I am Visiting Professor at the Saint Louis University School of Law for the Fall Semester for Workers Compensation and Tort.

Michael C. Duff

It is always interesting to take a look at another state’s Workers’ Compensation Act. And this is the first time I’ve taught these two subjects in the same semester.

This is also an interesting exercise. It’s been a while since I’ve blogged, and I thought I’d start by featureding my upcoming article in the San Diego Law Review, “What COVID-19 Bare: Adventures in Workers’ Compensation Causation”.

Here is the summary:

In this essay, the coverage of workers by COVID-19 disability insurance is analyzed in depth and concludes that it should not be “impossible” to legally prove that a worker’s COVID-19 was caused by work. Scientific evidence is not the same as legal evidence: Workers’ accident law has never required that claims be backed up by irrefutable scientific evidence of causation in the workplace. However, this suggestion has been heard repeatedly in the public discussion about workers’ compensation insurance.

Yet there is good evidence that, even when workers’ compensation is undisputedly covering work-related illness, employers rarely pay benefits (and states do not require them to do so). This is a reality that COVID has exposed: the employee compensation system is strictly opposed to the payment of claims for occupational diseases. The essay also examines a news report from Minnesota which states that by February 2021, nine hundred and thirty-five out of nine hundred and thirty-five worker compensation claims related to COVID-19 had not been paid by meat packers. There was no shortage of other stories during the pandemic of mass denial of workers’ compensation claims in the meat packer industry, a development with varying implications for colored communities where more than half of all meat packers are Latinx. These unpaid damage figures suggest that something “was wrong” with the root cause analyzes further down in the administration system.

Another truth that COVID has disclosed is that the United States has no nationwide short-term disability program other than employee compensation. This leads to the conclusion that if employee compensation is to cover claims for very severe versions of the causation, another method of compensating for short-term incapacity during pandemics or other “environmental” crises may be required. The conclusion seems almost inevitable as public health experts like Dr. Warn Fauci that in the “foreseeable future” we will remain exposed to the risk of “new diseases”.

I will write and research a lot here at SLU Law, which is home to the Wefel Center for Labor Law and publishes the ABA Journal of Labor & Employment Law. I feel very much in my element.

Michael C. Duff is a professor of law at the University of Wyoming College of Law. This entry was posted with permission from the Workers’ Compensation Law Professors blog.