Why is the Obama Administration Seeking to Slash Workers Compensation Benefits?

The Obama administration is really going out with a bang when it comes to the American working class. First there’s the Trans-Pacific Partnership and now the administration is seeking to reduce worker compensation benefits for some federal workers. Specifically, Obama is looking to reduce benefits paid out through the Federal Employees Compensation Act to 70 percent of their normal salaries. Right now, employees with dependents, about 2/3 of them, receive 75 percent.

Like the Obama administration, Rep. Tim Walberg (Mich.), the Republican chairman of a House Education and the Workforce subcommittee, cited “concerns” that workers’ comp benefits “are too generous and can discourage an employee’s return to work.”

The changes proposed by the Labor Department would save Uncle Sam money, but at the cost of cutting future payments to most workers injured on the job. But nowhere in the department’s recent statement to the House workforce-protections subcommittee did the agency provide evidence to back the administration’s concern about “disincentives” for the return to work.

“I am disappointed that the Department of Labor would come forward for the third time in the past five years with a proposal to cut benefits for injured workers that is not evidence-based, and whose justification has been completely debunked by the Government Accountability Office,” said Rep. Robert “Bobby” Scott (Va.), the top Democrat on the full committee. He finds it “incomprehensible that we are now considering” hits to feds “who have suffered a disabling work-related injury while doing their jobs in service to the American people.”

The idea that working people are a bunch of lazy slackers who really want to get out of work is a right-wing myth that goes back to the first proposals for workers compensation. Companies have always concern trolled the American working class by wondering what generous benefits like making a percentage of your former wage when your arm is cut off by a machine would do to the national work ethic. I expect such lies from Republicans and corporations, but it’s quite disconcerting to see the Obama administration accept some of these arguments.

There is only one appropriate figure for workers compensation benefits and that’s 100 percent of the workers’ former wages until that worker is cleared by a doctor to return. The idea of workers trying to game the system and stay at home insults them because it completely ignores that people take pride in work and for the most part don’t want to live on government benefits. Yes, some people would try to stay at home, but the large majority would want to return to work. Only with a 100 percent benefit do employers have the necessary incentive to make work safe. The reason the focus is on slacking workers instead of lazy employers is power–companies and the government has it, workers don’t. But there’s no evidence that workers are more likely to abuse the system than employers.

The Obama administration needs to reverse this position immediately.