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Workers' Comp Stats Make COBA's Case: Jails Growing More Dangerous (Free Article)

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A recently-released report on the city's Workers' Compensation costs is helping the Correction Officers Benevolent Association make its case that the de Blasio administration’s less-restrictive policies on inmates are making the jails more dangerous for its members.

In 2014, Department of Correction employees filed 3,560 Workers' Comp claims and the city paid out just over $3 million in lost wages and medical expenses. In 2017, more than 5,000 work-injury claims were filed with the DOC and the city paid out in excess of $5.3 million in lost wages and medical costs.

For historical context, in 2006 just 1,341 DOC claims were filed and the city paid out just $866,000.

Even though Correction comprises less than four percent of the city’s workforce, its comp claims made up close to 25 percent of the 18,604 worker-injury claims the city received from its agencies in 2017.

‘Vicious Cycle’

“The reason our numbers are so high is that we do not have the protection of this Mayor or Commissioner,” COBA President Elias Husamudeen said in a phone interview. “These injuries are an everyday occurrence for us: a broken finger, a broken jaw, a missing tooth.”

He blamed Mr. de Blasio's policy of not permitting DOC to place minors in punitive segregation. “We have 97 16- and 17-year-olds, but 40 percent of them are there for attempted murder and murder,” he said. “We keep hearing over and over about the declining inmate population, but the ones we have are getting increasingly violent.”

Mr. Husamudeen said that the heavy workplace injury rate added to DOC’s reliance on overtime. “This just perpetuates a vicious cycle,” he said, because the more overtime officers work, the more likely they are to becoming fatigued, making them more vulnerable to injury.

According to a U.S. Department of Labor fact sheet, worker fatigue related to overtime increases the risk for illnesses and injuries, with “accident and injury rates 18% greater during evening shifts and 30% greater during night shifts when compared to day shifts. Research indicates that working 12 hours per day is associated with a 37% increased risk of injury.”

"This increase in payments is related to higher staffing levels, higher wages, and our strengthened emphasis on timely and proper claim reporting," DOC Deputy Commissioner of Public Information Peter Thorne said in a statement. "As always, the safety and well-being of our staff is our top priority and we continue to look for ways to make our workplace as safe as possible."

Tip of the Injury Iceberg

The DOC Workers' Compensation data was published in a voluminous report the city’s Law Department has been required to put out annually since 2004. It does not include the police force, firefighters, uniformed employees of the Department of Sanitation, or Teachers, none of whom is covered by the New York State Workers' Compensation system.

The marked uptick at DOC came as the city saw an overall 17-percent spike in the number of worker-injury claims from 2016 to 2017. Last year it paid out $25.68 million for lost wages and health-care costs related to workplace injuries. In 2016, covering lost wages and medical expenses for injured workers set the city back $21.91 million.

“The spike in injuries reflected in this latest report is alarming,” said Council Member I. Daneek Miller, Chair of the Committee on Civil Service and Labor. “It underscores the need for the disclosure of additional data that would help identify patterns within agencies or titles prone to injury or illness so that the information can be used to design mitigation programs to reduce the risk of harm to workers.”

Lost Wages Biggest Bite

The biggest share of the increase in costs was for missed wages for sidelined city workers. Last year the city paid out $14.69 million in lost wages, an increase of close to $3 million, or 25 percent, over 2016. Medical costs rose 7 percent over the same period, to $10.69 million.

The city is also subject to penalties determined by the Workers’ Compensation Board. Under the de Blasio administration, those sanctions have spiked from just $16,274 in 2015 to $166,215 in 2016 and $289,119 in 2017.

“All of these injuries are preventable,” Joel Shufro, the former executive director of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, said in a phone interview. “The data could be very useful. On just a basic human level, thousands of people are dealing with unnecessary human suffering. There is a tremendous opportunity here to improve on worker safety that would help to contain costs.”

He continued, “There is a lot of money here because what’s listed in the report is just the direct costs, not the indirect costs of lost productivity and replacement overtime. These indirect costs are three to ten times the direct costs.”

More Details Needed

Mr. Shufro, like Mr. Miller, believes that the 2004 law passed by the Council to require the annual report did not go far enough. "What you really need is to know job titles and locations so you can get granular," he said. "What the stats probably don't tell you us is the number of occupational-disease cases like cancer or nerve damage that workers come down with because of exposure to chemicals...or whose symptoms became manifest 20-40 years after exposure."

Charlene Obernauer, the executive director of NYCOSH, believes the existing format of the annual Workers' Compensation report contains “useful information.” But she maintained in a phone interview that the most-important question is to what degree the report is actually “disseminated and critically reviewed” and becomes the basis for making changes as required. “So you are left to ask: just who is accountable for this?” she asked.

According to the annual report, in 2017 DOC ranked highest with 5,007 workplace injury claims, followed by 3,842 at NYC Health + Hospitals, 3,388 at the Department of Education, 1,666 in the FDNY—which includes the Emergency Medical Service and civilian personnel—and 1,298 from the NYPD’s civilian workforce. Those five agencies represented 82 percent of all the Workers' Compensation claims brought against the city in 2017.


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