NWCDN Members regularly post articles and summary judgements in workers’ compensations law in your state.
Select a state from the dropdown menu below to scroll through the state specific archives for updates and opinions on various workers’ compensation laws in your state.
Contact information for NWCDN members is also located on the state specific links in the event you have additional questions or your company is seeking a workers’ compensation lawyer in your state.
In an interview with NPR, United States Department of Labor Secretary Thomas Perez called laws
in Texas and Oklahoma that allow employers to opt out of providing traditional workers’
compensation insurance a “pathway to poverty” for people who get injured on the job.
Mr. Perez said the Labor Department is commissioning a report about the opt-out trend and cutbacks
in workers' comp benefits “to document the precise nature of this problem across the country.” It’s
also been reported that the Labor Department is currently investigating a large provider of opt-out
plans in Texas to determine “whether the company's plans or models contain provisions that
interfere with or prevent the exercise of ERISA rights by covered employees.”
On March 18th, Stanford law professor Alison Morantz released her study of the impact of nonsubscription
on 15 large companies that provided their Texas employees with a workers’
compensation alternative. She found that the costs per worker fell by about 44 percent.
Ms. Morantz did not examine whether workers were better off with the alternative plans or whether
the savings came at their expense. However, she concluded her “findings suggest an urgent need
for policymakers to examine the economic and distributional effects of converting workers’
compensation from a cornerstone of the social welfare state into an optional program that exists
alongside privately-provided forms of occupational injury insurance.”
Last month, we reported that the Oklahoma Workers’ Compensation Commission declared
unconstitutional the recently enacted state law allowing employers to opt-out of the state-regulated
workers’ compensation system, i.e., become non-subscribers, as they are referred to in Texas.