Union Groups Protest New Proposed Legislation In Tennessee Which Would Take Workers' Comp Out Of The Courts And Align It With A Government System Already Fraught With Dysfunction By Lonce LaMon - April 12, 2013
They want the changes stopped; they state these changes will gut workers’ comp. This Bill was passed by the Tennessee Senate on April 1st.
A rally leader spoke through a megaphone earlier this week, “The legislators are not listening. It’s as if they have their fingers in their ears. They will reduce payouts to workers.” An assembled outdoor group chanted, “Save workers’ comp!”
One of the problems that has many Tennesseans so concerned is that the new proposed workers’ compensation division would share administrative services with the Department of Labor—which is struggling badly at present to handle one of its core functions of distributing unemployment benefits. An audit released just last month showed $73 million in overpayments had been issued in recent years and the department failed to monitor fraud and abuse of these unemployment benefits. Thus, the severely stressed unemployment system now has unemployed Tennesseans waiting for months for their initial unemployment checks.
“We are calling on the governor to put the brakes on moving such a vital process for injured Tennessee workers into the most dysfunctional department in the state,” the Tennessee AFL-CIO Labor Council said in a statement. “This audit showed problems in multiple divisions of the department, not just in the Unemployment Insurance Division.”
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