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April 22, 2024
Sullivan on Comp Launches ChatSOC. It's an Innovative Chatbot for California Workers' Compensation Professionals Integrated with an Authoritative Legal Treatise

April 19, 2024
Workers Compensation Bill 2024: One percent of employee’s salary to contribute to workers’ compensation fund in Kenya.

April 15, 2024
Colorado Worker Shows Head Injury Happened as a Consequence of a Knock on the Head at Work

April 4, 2024
Callfornia Division of Workers' Compensation Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee Meeting Scheduled for April 17, 2024

While the Bush administration continues to take heat from environmentalists, many Democrat-sympathetic of that ilk are saying the first American President of the 21^st century may unwittingly be setting himself up as a rallying point for the opposition party, which finds itself uncharacteristically underpowered in the political arena, having lost both the presidency and congressional majority.

From California, Sen. Barbara Bush bluntly accuses Bush of "declar(ing) war on the environment." At a news conference on Capitol Hill, Boxer said, "…we are here today to tell him that we will fight that war—regulation by regulation, legislation by legislation, standard by standard."

In less than two weeks, the White House ticked off a spate of conservative legislative moves that rescinded tough workplace ergonomic rules, repealed a strict new standard for arsenic levels in drinking water, and is proposing suspending new environmental regulations on hardrock mining.

The standing GOP rationale for such environmental/safety concerns is, overreaching restrictions is bad for the economy. "This is not an anti-environmental administration," countered Christie Whitman, administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency. "It’s an administration that believes it is time to get away from the attitude that it has to be either a healthy environment or a healthy economy. We have to have both things, and that’s the balance that we’re going to be striking."

That prediction aside, there's a separate workers’ comp issue looming over how to compensate sick nuclear workers. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao has asked the White House to transfer responsibility for a new program from her agency to the Justice Department. At stake is an initial $60.4 appropriation for the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation passed last year by Congress.

Chao maintains that her agency doesn’t have the wherewithal to administer the program. Justice should run it because, according to Chao, it already administers payments to uranium miners and people living under fallout of nuclear test sites. The counter argument is, Labor has carried out similar WC programs for nearly 100 years, dating back to the Longshore and Harbor Workers Act and the Coal Miners Black Lung Disease Act.

Initially promulgated to aid Cold War-era workers suffering from cancer and other diseases, Congress did not specify which department should run the program, in which workers deemed to have illnesses connected to exposure to nuclear weapon material at privately owned and Energy Department facilities would receive payments of $150,000 and full medical coverage for life. Such payments are set to begin July 31 and could reach as high as $2 billion overall.

While the question over jurisdiction is being wrangled, one senator, Ted Strickland (D-Ohio), has argued, "I think that the inevitable result will be that victims will have a significant delay in receiving compensation. And some of these people, quite frankly, are dying."

Strickland sent a letter, signed by eight other congressmen including both parties, to the White House asking that Labor run the program. Two other senators, Republicans Mike DeWine and George Voinoverich, from Ohio, where many victims could be aided by the program, sent a similar letter.

Negotiations by congressional members on both sides of the aisle continue.