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

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April 3, 2024
California Division of Workers' Compensation Posts Adjustments to Official Medical Fee Schedule (DMEPOS)

April 2, 2024
California Division of Workers' Compensation Posts Adjustments to Official Medical Fee Schedule for Pathology and Clinical Laboratory

Video Broadcast Burton’s Sacrificial Offering Runtime 2:21 Real Media 56k | Broadband Windows Media Player 56k | Broadband Quicktime 56k | Broadband

An innate human characteristic is to defend and protect one’s own work and creations. The greater the effort, pain and struggle to bring one’s work to pass increases one’s conviction of the value or worth of the accomplishment.

Regarding this year’s legislation, Senator Richard Alarcon said, “We lived and breathed every intricacy of the complex Workers’ Compensation system, tweaking and crafting this legislation to the last minutes of the last day before the deadline.”

So if Senator John Burton and Alarcon really put forth the effort they claim to have over the past year to bring about AB 227 and SB 228, what prompted them to move so fast to repeal it?

Burton’s latest bill, SB 1, proposes to efface the work comp reform progress the Legislature made this past year. The Senate Committee on Labor and Industrial Relations passed it Nov. 25 as an urgency measure with a five to one vote.

During the recall election, Gray Davis touted AB 227 and SB 228 as a complete overhaul of the system. Governor Schwarzenegger responded by calling Davis’ claim as “pre-election bogus”, because the bills aren’t a complete overhaul.

So Burton, burned by Schwarzenegger’s mockery has decided to engage in political one-upmanship to see if the new governor can produce a better work comp reform product.

Whatever point Burton is trying to make by offering up his party’s work comp bills as a sacrifice, as a lame duck senator who’s termed out, he’s definitely making the point that he rather play games than deal with the serious issues that weren’t addressed in the first round of bills.