DFL48 | Restoring Common Sense Minnesota Values

Mar/15

27

Major Retailers Funding National Campaign to Gut Workers’ Comp

wage-slaveMolly Redden with Mother Jones reported on March 26, 2015, that Walmart, Lowe’s Safeway and Nordstrom and other large corporations “are bankrolling a quiet, multistate lobbying effort to make it harder for workers hurt on the job to access lost wages and medical care — the benefits collectively known as workers’ compensation.”

“The companies have financed a lobbying group, the Association for Responsible Alternatives to Workers’ Compensation (be afraid when you see Orwellian language, this is a good example, folks), that has already helped write legislation in one state, Tennessee.”  What does this lobbying group want? “… to pass laws allowing private employers to opt out of the traditional workers’ compensation plans that almost every state requires businesses to carry. But, they would be allowed to write their own rules governing when, for how long, and for which reasons an injured employee can access medical benefits and wages.”

Texas already allows this. “A 2012 survey of Texas companies with private plans found that fewer than half offered benefits to seriously injured employees or the families of workers who died in workplace accidents.”

Business can save millions of dollars with this kind of plan. But, it does put workers back in the role of fodder for the corporate machine and not needed individuals to make a corporation succeed.

With all that’s happening with corporations being seen a “people”, and money being “free speech” added on to the individual working for a living becoming nothing but a commodity, we can’t see how this ends well for anyone. Some of us are old enough or can recall history lessons from school about what happens when “those that got” forget that it took others to give them what they have.  It wasn’t pretty then.  It won’t be pretty when it happens again.  We hope corporate America, the 1% and the Republicans who do their bidding wake up before it’s too late.

You can find the full post here.

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