Occupational Safety and Health-Can We Rise Again?

Product Liability and Workers' Compensation

Product liability lawsuits and workers' compensation protect victims of dangerous products, toxic chemicals, and workplace injury and illness. Product liability is one of the few pressures on manufacturers to market safe products, since public safety agencies like OSHA are weakened by hostility and neglect.

Industry tries to blame victims' rights for economic difficulties, unemployment, loss of manufacturing jobs, and runaway shops. The Bush Administration campaigned on the issue of limiting victims' rights and bashing the lawyers who represent the victims. The same congressional conservatives who oppose OSHA, EPA and consumer safeguards against injury and illness have made cutting off victims' rights a central part of their agenda. This business agenda combines corporate welfare with government bailouts, doing nothing more than shifting costs of injuries and illness caused by unsafe products from the businesses which profited, to victims and taxpayers.

In 1999, the UAW and other unions beat back a massive corporate attack on workers' compensation rights in Ohio. This broad based coalition effort is a model for defending and expanding our rights. We must continue to show that corporate interests promote legislation which hurts ordinary people.

Background - Product Liability
Product liability suits permit victims injured or made ill by a dangerous product, machine, or chemical to recover damages from the manufacturer. The highest profile examples are the tobacco and asbestos litigation. Product liability rights are a core interest for working people. The majority of these suits are filed for on-the-job injuries or occupational disease, such as cancer from asbestos exposure. A worker can sue the manufacturer of a machine or manufacturer of a chemical for damages not fully covered by workers' compensation benefits. Even business admits that possible product liability suits pressure manufacturers to design safer products and test chemicals for potential hazards.

The legal and political issues regarding victims' rights overlap with medical malpractice, personal injury and other litigation under the legal term "tort reform." Corporate interests and insurance companies have mounted effective attacks on individual rights in state legislatures and in Congress by false claims that increased numbers of cases are being filed, and that jury awards to victims are "out of control." Business has also won some support by attacking the practices of lawyers who represented victims in this type of litigation.

Contrary to business claims, product liability suits filed in federal courts fell 36 per-cent in recent years, except for asbestos claims. Product liability claims are less than 10 percent of the cases filed in state courts. Only 7 percent of victims of work accidents, and 3 percent of victims of other accidents ever file suits.

Sweeping national product liability legislation is introduced in each Congress. Generally, the industry and conservative legislative agenda is to limit the time for filing claims, narrow the causes for which damages can be claimed, cap benefits and punitive damages, threaten victims who sue with penalties if they lose, and create unfair defenses that would excuse liability.

The product liability system needs fixing. It involves long delays, widely different compensation for victims with similar injuries, inefficiency, high expense and profiteering by insurance companies, corporate and certain victims' attorneys. However, industry interests simply propose to cut off victims' rights.

Background - Workers' Compensation
Employers also now claim there is also a workers' compensation "crisis." Recent increases in workers' compensation costs arise from: too many injuries, especially repeated trauma disorders; out of control medical care costs for injured workers; and insurance company financial mismanagement and profiteering. Management's failure to implement ergonomics programs, and success in stalling OSHA's ergonomics standard, combine to make this worse.

Workers' compensation is designed to be a no fault system to provide income and pay medical costs for workers suffering job related injuries or disease arising from workplace exposures. The workers' compensation system now is generally inequitable and inefficient. It has long been an adversarial system which provides sick or injured workers inadequate benefits after long delays.

These problems are made worse by state-to-state differences, so that workers with the same employer suffering the same disability may receive widely different benefits or no benefits at all. Every year we see attacks at the state level. Corporate interests use economic blackmail to whipsaw states, block reform and launch repeated attacks on state protections.

The most logical solution to this problem is national workers' compensation reform to equalize benefits and administration. Congressional action for broad reform of workers' compensation has been stalled for more than two decades, but must remain a goal of the labor movement.