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Recovering from Tropical Storm Harvey will be a dangerous process and can present multiple safety hazards to workers, according to experts. One of the biggest workplace safety risks will be employees completing unfamiliar tasks in the process of recovering from the storm, which made landfall on the Texas Gulf coast as a Category 4 hurricane. “You have all kinds of different hazards that recovery and response workers face,” said Jordan Barab, Washington D.C.-based former deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. “You have people working on the roof of houses, you have people working in the contaminated water, you’ve got confined spaces, you have people trying to deal with electrical outages, you have people trying to deal with fallen trees, heavy machinery. There is an uncountable number of hazard that can affect workers.” Click here to read more:

The rise in the use of contract and temporary workers raises questions about who is responsible for their safety in the workplace. But employers who use these workers at their work sites would be unwise to assume that they can offload their responsibility to protect them from injury and illness simply because they are not directly employed by their companies, experts say. “I think that it’s attractive for a lot of companies to have outsourced labor, mainly because it creates a lot of savings for the company,” said Brian A. Richardson, Richmond, Virginia-based director of the litigation practice group at McCandlish Holton Click here to read more:

States that enacted reforms to rein in the high cost of drugs dispensed by physicians to injured workers face an uphill battle as some doctors find loopholes in the regulations. These loopholes mean that workers compensation prescription costs remain stagnant or are rising in some states, leading to calls for additional restrictions on physician dispensing, experts say. Click here to read more:

Employers buying workers compensation coverage in early 2018 are typically seeing slight rate decreases or flat renewals as the competitive market place of the past several years continues, according to brokers. Improved underwriting results, abundant capacity and reforms in various states have kept a lid on increases for most accounts, they say. Click to read more:

Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis today announced the arrest of Oscar M. Palma made by the Department of Financial Services' Disaster Fraud Action Strike Team. Palma, a Fort Myers contractor, was reported to authorities after allegedly making subpar roof repairs to an area apartment complex following Hurricane Irma. Upon launching an investigation, fraud detectives quickly learned that while Palma advertised himself as a licensed and insured contractor, he in fact held no workers' compensation coverage and was not licensed as a contractor. Click here to read more:

Fatalities in the construction sector are on the rise as the industry’s workforce ages and youngsters show no interest in replacing them — a challenge that safety experts are looking to mitigate in part through the use of new technologies. The total number of construction fatalities has been climbing for several years, with 738 deaths reported in 2011 and 991 deaths reported in 2016, according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The leading causes of deaths in the construction industry were falls, electrocutions, struck by object, caught in or between equipment, according to the bureau. Click to read more:

Sixty-nine percent of employees surveyed recently reported that they are tired at work, raising workplace safety concerns as many of those employees work in safety-critical jobs, according to a report released Monday by the National Safety Council. The Itasca, Illinois-based organization's report is the third in a series on workplace fatigue and exposes a gap between how employees and employers view the risks and consequences of being tired at work, according to a statement. The survey included input from 2,110 employees, a majority in manufacturing, transportation, and utilities, and 504 employers. Click to read more:

Workers’ compensation claim denial rates increased a little over one percent between 2014 and 2017, according to a white paper published earlier this year by Lockton. The increase is significant because of the increased costs associated with denied claims. The analysis examined denial rates and focused on answering two questions: What’s driving the increase? Is a high denial rate in the best interest of the employer? Click here to read more:

Ensuring compliance with federal or state occupational safety and health laws and regulations is only part of a workplace safety and health professional’s job. Often, safety managers also handle aspects of an employer’s workers’ compensation program. The two aspects of the job have different demands. OSHA, a federal agency within the Department of Labor, develops workplace safety and health standards that apply nationwide. Despite the fact that approximately half of U.S. states operate under state plans for occupational safety and health, there is a high degree of overall uniformity in workplace safety compliance obligations from one state to the next. Meanwhile, workers’ compensation is administered at the state level. It shields employers from liabilities for workers’ injuries, illnesses, and deaths while covering the costs of workers’ medical treatments and lost wages or providing death benefits to the surviving spouse and children of a worker killed on the job. Most states’ original workers’ compensation laws predate the federal Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Act of 1970, and the provisions of these laws vary greatly from state to state. All states except Texas require employers to purchase workers’ compensation insurance coverage. Click to read more:

A Crystal River woman on Monday admitted to stealing thousands in federal workers' compensation and improperly reporting her income to get additional disability benefits. Ruth S. Sprake, 60, pleaded guilty at the U.S. District Courthouse in Ocala to charges of theft of government funds and making false statements to the Social Security Administration (SSA), according to a release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Middle District of Florida. A judge will sentence Sprake at an undetermined date to up to 15 years in prison Click to read more:

A recent but long-awaited ruling by the Florida Supreme Court is likely to negatively impact cost associated with workers’ compensation claims and insurance premiums for any business that employs workers in Florida. On April 26, 2016, in Castellanos v. Next Door Company, the Florida Supreme Court, in a five to two ruling, determined that the provision stated in an October 2003 workers’ compensation law (Senate Bill 50A), which caps attorney fees based on a specific formula, is unconstitutional under both the Florida and U.S. Constitutions. The original article is no longer available

Hiring independent contractors is a growing practice for many businesses, allowing them to take on work larger in scope without all of the associated costs involved in hiring full-time employees—including the expense of workers’ compensation insurance. However, the use of independent contractors may also lead to the unforeseen risk for businesses of being deemed an uninsured employer or statutory employer under the Pennsylvania Workers' Compensation Act (the act), which can expose businesses to significant expense and criminal prosecution under the act, as well as liability under the Construction Workplace Misclassification Act (CWMA) Click here to read more: