Workers' Comp Woes
I’m a small concrete contractor responding to John W. Dickens letter. Dickens states that we can control our insurance costs. How can I do this when I get a guy out of the [hiring] hall? He works for me 33 days and then files a huge workers compensation insurance claim for a worn-out shoulder. He obviously did not wear out his shoulder in 33 days. But the whole claim goes against my experience modification rate. How can I control this? Workers comp is totally out of control. Now, I just hire subcontractors.
Thank you for having the guts and the wherewithal to print the important and meaningful editorial entitled “Help Is on the Way for Tool Users Through Prayer”.
I am not a super religious person, but it is good to know that someone in this country has enough guts in a prominent magazine to print something from the heart. Well done. And I agree—a little bit of prayer won’t hurt this country a bit.
y
State of the UnionsI read your editorial, but I fail to understand why we need unions.
In a union state, if we have to use union labor, we have no problem with it, as long as we can bid it competitively. We run into a problem when the unions want us to use their personnel, yet they don’t have the job-specific expertise for our specialized work.
Several times, we have used our personnel to run wire in a building, only to get a call several days later that the system has failed. Upon inspection, we find that the local union contractor has cut and removed several pieces of wire.
I would never cut out someone else’s work because I didn’t agree with their politics. We work side by side with union and nonunions contractors every day. We believe that “the customer is always right, and the customer comes first.”
I don’t consider union workers to be my enemy. I do think that the unions need to look at the whole picture—maybe from the customers’ perspective—and do their jobs the best they can. No finger-pointing or: “I couldn’t do my job because of what they did.” Just get it done, make the customer happy, and have that customer sing your praises. I can’t think of a better way to get business.