Changes to Tennessee Worker's Compensation: "Not fair. Not Helpful. Not Reform. Not Relief:"

The proposal to change the way the system works - and it's a big, big, BIG change - will not only severly limit the amount of relief that will go to an injured worker and his family, but changes the way the system works so much that it will primarily concentrate all the decision-making power into the hands of one politically-appointed bureaucrat.

Tennessee may revamp workers' comp laws: Our system, which has been good enough for almost 100 years, apparently no longer is good enough. Understand that the state government has quietly been gutting peoples' rights in worker's compensation for years. The only real possibility of a fair and just result was the chance to take a decision before a judge or the Supreme Court. The current Worker's Cpmpensation Specialist program is under-funded, understaffed, and has people sitting in judgment of peoples' claims who often are not qualified to be a "judge." Regardless, the state wants to create an entirely new agency -- imagine how much that will cost -- to extend and perpetuate the increasing unfairness experienced by the workers of our state on a daily basis.

Why? Here's the answer, right at the end of the article: "[Court involvement] really has led to some court decisions that have been quite adverse to employers.” Big Business has so little respect for the public that they don't even come up with a new excuse for taking away your rights; this is the same canard they used last year and the year before.

Whatever legislation is proposed by the Pilot state government, er, the Haslam Administration, will pass; the Republicans have more than enough votes to do basically whatever they want. And what they want is for no individual in this state to have either the right or practical ability to seek compensation for personal injuries.

To paraphrase Herman Wouk, in War and Remembrance [ebook, p.125], when individual rights die, they die like a cloudy day, without a visible moment of sunset. So it is with worker's compensation, and so it has been for the rights of Tennesseeans to see legal redress in the courts.