Can Snyder Be Stopped as He Targets Workers’ Comp?

Rick Snyder is starting to look like General Sherman, marching through Georgia burning down farms and shooting anything that got in his way. Snyder’s war on the poor and the workers of Michigan has been relentless since the day he took office, and now there’s more news to add to the growing list of his crimes against the citizens of Michigan.

His signing of a law that forbid anyone who owned a car worth $15,000 to collect food stamps (after putting a two-year lifetime cap on welfare payments) had thrown thousands of already food-insufficient families into crisis. Many poor people have cars that they have nursed along for ten or twenty years, and in a state with minimal public transport, those cars are necessary if family members are going to look for work. But if they couldn’t even get food stamps, their choice was between any hope for employment or feeding their kids today or tomorrow. This law was so outrageous that Snyder was forced to partially back down on it as it received national attention.

Snyder’s emergency manager laws are terrorizing people across the state as EFM appointees from Snyder’s cadre of robber barons seize public lands, close schools, fire elected officials, and privatize public utilities. Michigan Forward is currently waging a battle to keep Detroit out of the hands of an EFM—their own current, corrupt mayor has bid for the job and looks like he has the approval of Lansing—but there’s been no recent news from them on their effort to repeal Public Act 4.

And now Snyder is turning his attention toward workers’ compensation. This law protects workers who have been injured on the job—allowing them to collect partial wages and pay for doctors’ bills after being examined by a workers’ compensation doctor and having their case reviewed by the Workers’ Compensation Appellate Commission in the case of disputes.

Snyder’s plan is to eliminate the impartial review in order to achieve an annual savings of $1.2 million. So who will review the cases? Why, Snyder appointees, of course. He has already made some appointments—with all three of his new appointees in the pocket of the insurance industry, and all three right-wing conservatives. 

Yesterday, the state senate passed Snyder’s bill, which requires injured workers to return to work before they have completely recovered from their injuries, and puts them at risk of losing all their benefits if they cannot do the job assigned to them. They also have to accept whatever job is assigned, even if the pay is significantly less than their former wage. The law further states that benefits can be docked based on the possibility of wages that the injured employee could be earning at a hypothetical job, even if there is no such job available.

The bill, HB5002, also puts more power into the hands of the review board by requiring workers who want a second opinion or be cared for by their own doctors during their recovery to pay for those expenses themselves. Of course, these changes have been heartily approved by the Michigan Chamber of Commerce for the way they take “employers’ needs” into account—even though the employers are frequently the ones at fault for allowing conditions that caused the injury.

The Senate Minority Leader, Gretchen Whitmer, said, “It seems like every week, Senate Republicans find a new way to attack Michigan workers and roll out another bill to erode their rights and the benefits they depend on to survive.”

And Karla Swift, president of Michigan’s AFL-CIO, commented that the bill “would turn the system on its head by changing the law so that employees would not only lose their workers’ compensation by the wages they earn when they return to work, but by the amount of wages they could possibly earn at a job not even offered to them.”

In other words, it’s business as usual for Czar Snyder as he dismantles every citizen protection he can think of to put more money in the pocket of the capitalists.

And that unemployment rate he promised to improve? Well, it’s improving…because more people are leaving the state permanently rather than suffer any more under this fascist regime. Michigan’s job market improved a whopping 1 percent during Rick’s first year in office…and 1.8 percent of able-bodied workers have left the state or taken early retirement. Doing the math on that one is easy, and accounts for the drop in unemployment claims that Governor Snyder has been singing praises over this holiday season.

But Snyder’s not singing about this: Only 2,000 people this year in Michigan found full-time work at a living wage as Rick continues to transfer bundles of cash, tax cuts, cost eliminations, and state funds to industry leaders.

Protest image from FightBackNews.org

Czar Snyder image used by permission from artist Linda Robinson