Tag: Workers Comp

A Texas appellate court ruled a trial court wrongly compelled Home Depot USA Inc. to produce certain documents and materials sought by an employee in an injured worker case.

The Court of Appeals of Texas ruled Thursday a trial court erred in issuing an order compelling discovery in a personal injury lawsuit by worker Brandon Giard.

Mr. Giard claimed he injured his back while loading a lawnmower onto a customer’s trailer in November 2020.

He served Home Depot with a deposition notice in January seeking certain documents and testimony from corporate representatives. Home Depot objected, arguing the information sought was overly broad and not applicable to the case, but it still agreed to offer the testimony of the manager of the store where Mr. Giard worked.

Lawyers on both sides subsequently engaged in various discovery disagreements but a trial judge ultimately sided with Mr. Giard on his discovery requests.

Home Depot appealed the order, but Mr. Giard argued the company waived its objections to his deposition notice when it failed to file a motion for a protective order instead of conceding to certain discovery requests.

The appeals court found Home Depot was harmed by the trial court’s ruling compelling discovery, and that the court wrongly refused to revisit the company’s argument that it shouldn’t be required to produce materials and videos unrelated to the workplace incident giving rise to Mr. Giard’s injuries. 

 

 

An audit of the Maryland Workers’ Compensation Commission found that regulators failed to track employers that do not carry workers compensation insurance and failed to keep adequate compliance records.

The Maryland General Assembly’s Office of Legislative Audits with the Department of Legislative Services conducted a fiscal compliance audit of the commission for the period from August 2018 to September 2022.

Dated July 27 but made public Friday, the audit found that the 10-member commission during that time period “did not use available information to proactively identify employers that did not have the required workers compensation insurance” and that the commission did not use records it obtains from the Maryland Department of Labor, Unemployment Insurance Division, to identify employers that may not have current workers comp coverage.

Auditors used state data and information from an insurance rating and data collection bureau to identify 1,650 employers with employees that “appeared” to lack workers comp coverage. A test of 20 employers on that list revealed that 19 did not have coverage, according to the report.

The audit also found that the commission did not maintain complete tracking records of actions taken against potentially noncompliant employers. An examination of the case docket records for a seven-day period disclosed that 21% of employers scheduled for hearings were not listed on the tracking records and 76% of records did not indicate the outcome of the cases.

 

A Pennsylvania appellate court on Thursday reversed a workers compensation judge’s decision granting loss benefits to a Hershey Co. worker whose leg was surgically amputated after he developed a diabetic foot ulcer.

Commonwealth Court sided with the employer in a case brought by Shawn Woodhouse, who had a history of diabetic neuropathy at the time he began working for Hershey in May 2017.

Mr. Woodhouse underwent emergency foot surgery in late 2017 and later had his right leg partially amputated.  

He received Social Security disability benefits in May 2018 and later claimed he suffered a work-related injury, petitioning the employer for specific loss benefits.

Hershey disputed the injury was job-related.

A comp judge approved the claim with respect to the foot injuries but denied the portion involving the leg amputation.

A comp board reversed the leg amputation decision and approved benefits for all injuries.

Hershey claimed the comp judge and board erred because Mr. Woodhouse failed to offer statutorily required timely notice of his injury. The initial injury was in November 2017 and the claim petition for loss benefits was filed in December 2019.

The appeals court agreed with Hershey, ruling Mr. Woodhouse failed to offer timely notice of a work-related injury.

 

 

 

 

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration has cited a Texas construction company for endangering workers by not providing adequate fall protection systems.

OSHA on Wednesday announced it cited Houston-based Sonny Steel Erectors Inc. for one serious violation, one willful violation and one repeat violation after inspectors discovered employees working on erecting a steel building in Cypress in February did not have proper fall protection.

OSHA proposed $266,416 in penalties.

The company has 15 business days to contest the citations and fines.

OSHA said it cited the company for similar workplace safety violations in 2019, 2020 and 2022, and that the latest inspection found the contractor failed to correct hazards associated with violations that date from 2011.

 

 

A California appeals court on Wednesday declined to revisit the case of a woman prosecuted for workers compensation fraud, ruling that reopening the matter would prejudice the defendant.

The California Court of Appeals denied state prosecutors’ appeal of a trial judge’s decision allowing a lesser charge in a criminal case against Evelyn Rivera, who was charged in 2018 with two felony insurance fraud counts for filing a false comp claim.

The trial court reduced the two felonies to misdemeanors when Ms. Rivera agreed to pay $20,000 in restitution, perform 20 hours of community service and attend a life skills class.

Prosecutors challenged the court’s jurisdiction to reduce the Insurance Code felony count. Ms. Rivera sought to set aside that count on the grounds the alleged conduct must be charged under a more specific health care fraud provision.

The trial court agreed and ordered the felony reduced to a misdemeanor after Ms. Rivera paid restitution.

The appeals court denied the state’s petition because “the need for review does not outweigh the risk of harassment of the accused.”

The court found Ms. Rivera correctly argued the state should have prosecuted her under the more specific health care fraud provision, and it dismissed the remainder of the state’s appeal as moot.  

 

 

(Reuters) — The National Labor Relations Board  Wednesday made it more difficult for businesses to defend workplace rules that could interfere with employees’ rights to join unions, as part of a case involving waste disposal company Stericycle.

The board’s 3-1 decision could provide a boost to unions amid an uptick in labor organizing that includes high-profile campaigns among employees of Starbucks Corp., Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and other large companies.

Routine work rules like those banning disparagement, solicitation or inappropriate social media posts are illegal if a worker could reasonably construe them as prohibiting protected activity such as discussing working conditions or distributing union literature, the NLRB said.

The board overturned a 2017 ruling by appointees of former President Donald Trump that said workplace policies were valid as long as they were adopted for legitimate business reasons.

NLRB Chair Lauren McFerran in a statement said the Trump-era decision, which involved Boeing Co., did not give enough consideration to the chilling effect that workplace policies can have on workers’ labor rights.

“Under the new standard, the Board will carefully consider both the potential impact of work rules on employees and the interests that employers articulate in support of their rules,” said Ms. McFerran, an appointee of President Joe Biden.

Wednesday’s ruling stems from a union’s challenge to Stericycle Inc.’s policies barring worker conduct that could harm the company’s reputation or create conflicts of interest.

The labor board did not rule on the merits of the case but sent it back to an administrative judge to apply the new standard.

The board’s Democratic majority said employers can rebut the presumption that a rule is unlawful by proving to the NLRB that it “advances a legitimate and substantial interest” that cannot be addressed with a narrower policy.

NLRB member Marvin Kaplan, a Trump appointee, said in a dissenting opinion that that standard will be virtually impossible for many employers to meet. He added that his colleagues had failed to balance workers’ labor rights with businesses’ ability to adopt reasonable rules.

A Maryland appellate court Wednesday upheld a jury award of workers compensation benefits for a retired volunteer firefighter diagnosed with throat cancer.  

The Maryland Appellate Court ruled in favor of former firefighter Charles Shindle, whose cancer claim was initially disallowed by the state’s Workers’ Compensation Commission but approved following a jury trial.

Mr. Shindle was a volunteer firefighter for about 30 years with the Maugansville Volunteer Fire Department, a division of the Washington County Volunteer Fire and Rescue Association.

In 2017, at age 82, he was diagnosed with throat cancer, which he claimed was connected to firefighting.

The commission determined Mr. Shindle’s did not sustain an occupational disease and also found the claim noncompensable because a firefighter cancer presumption didn’t exist at the time of his disablement.

During litigation, the firefighting association challenged an expert’s opinion regarding the connection between the throat cancer and volunteer firefighting duties, arguing Mr. Shindle had other risk factors that could have been contributory.

The appeals court found the medical expert “articulated a logical explanation for his conclusions based on Mr. Shindle’s medical history,” and that the trial court didn’t err in denying a defense motion seeking to prohibit the expert’s testimony.

 

 

While consumer prices for energy, food and housing between 2021 and 2022 saw drastic increases, there’s little evidence such inflationary pressures affected workers compensation medical costs, according to a report released Thursday by the Workers Compensation Research Institute.

The study identified the main drivers of the workers comp medical cost growth, finding that a major contributor to price increases in the general health care system was the growth in hospital payments and that similar patterns were found in workers comp.

Researchers also found evidence that workers comp fee schedules are “effective tools to temper medical inflation for professional prices to levels similar or below those in the general health care system.”

States that updated their fee schedule rates based on inflationary growth in the general economy rather than within the medical sector started to see faster price growth in 2022, WCRI said. 

 

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