MA program on employer insurance fraud

Immigrant workers are often exposed to predatory employer practices which violate labor laws. One place to start enforcement is in workers compensation and, in particular, workers comp insurance. Here is good example of state initiative.
Massachusetts’ Department of Industrial Accidents has improved significantly its enforcement of workers compensation insurance requirements in the past few years. Its program, which you can find here, gives you a sense of what it takes to give teeth to enforcement. It has greatly improved the success rate of enforcement.
Below is a excerpt dealing with stop work orders:

The leads can come from an employee of the company, a competitor or the Massachusetts Rating Bureau. The lead is assigned to an investigator in the area where the business is located who then conducts an investigation.

If the investigation confirms that the business is violating the statute, the investigator will notify the business and allow the business to come into compliance. If the business does not respond to the investigator or refuses to come into compliance by obtaining the requisite insurance, the investigator will then conduct an on-site investigation at the location of the business.

If the on-site investigation confirms the preliminary investigation, the investigator will then issue a Stop Work Order (SWO), which is a cease and desist order requiring the business to shut down. The business will then be given a right to appeal the SWO within 10 days.

I thank Workers Comp Insider for alerting me to this article by Gregory White, who as general counsel runs the enforcement operations of DIA.
A number of states have beefed up resources to detect and go after employers to commit labor violations, including failure to pay employees for wages earned, failure to pay overtime, failure to make unemployment insurance contributions, and failure to purchase workers compensation insurance.

Where undocumented immigrants live and work

In January 2004,the Urban Institute published a useful overview of the undocumented population in the United States. Go here for the entire report.
The Institute estimated there were at that time 9.3 million immigrants, of which 6 million were workers. 96% of men work and 62% of women work.
Breakdown of the total population of undocumented immigrants is:
U.S. total (in millions) 9.3; California, 2.4; Texas, 1.1; Florida, 0.9; New York, 0.7; Illinois, 0.4; New Jersey, 0.4; all others, all others, 3.5.

Whom day laborers work for, what they do

A snapshot from On the Corner: Day Labor in the United States:
Principal employers of day laborers are (1) contractors in the construction and landscape gardening business and (2) private individuals. Two thirds of day laborers are hired repeatedly by the same employer.
At least three quarters of day laborers have work in most or all of the following occupations: construction labor, mover, gardner/landscaper, and painter. About two thirds have worked as roofers. Other common occupations are house cleaner, carpenter, and drywall installer.
The vast majority –- 83% — rely on day labor as their sole source of income, and 70% seek work at least five days a week. One third seek work seven days a week.
Go here for a full copy of On The Corner.

How Mexicans in U.S. send money back to Mexico

Money flows from Mexican workers in the United States to Mexico are approaching $20 billion a year. I have excerpted from the Financial Times (subscription required) an article on this topic, describing methods of transmission and surprising ways in which the money once received is used.
Excerpts from the Financial Times, Home towns and US banks grow better at reaping benefit of migrants’ dollars, By John Authers 12/12/05
Take a walk along Broadway in the New York district of Harlem, and you can begin to understand the recent strength of the Mexican peso against the dollar. Now in a largely Hispanic neighbourhood, with a pocket of Mexican migrants from the state of Puebla, Broadway is lined by remittance houses, all advertising in Spanish what they say are cheap rates.
It is a phenomenon repeated in Mexican neighbourhoods across the US. In the past few years, the economic weight of Mexico’s migrant labourers has begun to make itself felt south of the border. The migrants’ dollars help to explain the strength of the peso, and they are also beginning to wreak much more profound social changes at home.
The numbers, as published by the Bank of Mexico, tell an extraordinary story. For the first 10 months of this year, the money sent home to Mexico from the US in family remittances was $16.5bn – only just below the $16.6bn that was sent back during all of 2004. It is also $10bn more than the $6.6bn remitted to Mexico in 2000.
This money was sent mostly in transactions of about $300, and is increasingly sent by electronic transfer, rather than the traditional money orders.
Banxico is careful to state that the rise may not be as sharp as it appears, because its information-gathering has improved. Its earlier figures may therefore have understated the phenomenon.
……….
Migrants now have a greater array of options when they want to send money home. In 2002, many banks in the US decided they would accept consular ID cards, known as the matricula, as proof of identity from migrants wanting to open bank accounts. The cards were available from consulates to all Mexicans, even those working in the US illegally.
City and state municipal authorities across the US were happy to recognise the cards, which could also be used to obtain driving licences. The idea was to regularise or improve the status of undocumented labourers.
The effect of the cards was immediate. Wells Fargo, one of the largest US banks in the areas with high rates of Mexican immigration, reported that 400,000 people used the cards to open accounts with its branches. The cards ushered in competition, with Citigroup, Bank of America and HSBC all also offering remittance services.
Technical improvements have also helped. For example, the Poni card, backed by several patents, is now available in Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson and Chicago and will soon spread to areas with higher concentrations of Mexicans such as California, New York and Texas. Migrants can buy Poni cards, which come in various peso denominations and look much like phone cards, in US groceries, and scratch off the foil on the back to reveal a 16-digit PIN number. Armed with that PIN, a Mexican can take one of the 1m Poni cards in circulation south of the border, and use it to withdraw that amount from an ATM. Each PIN can only be used once, and the ATM will respond only to the PIN. The card’s backers believe that its key advantage, compared with a bank account, is that it maintains anonymity. It is also sold the same way as phone cards, which are already popular items among migrants.
……….
There is controversy, however, over the impact of remittances on Mexico, and even whether all the money that shows up in the Bank of Mexico figures really goes to poor families.
Rodolfo Tuiran of Sedesol, the social development ministry, stirred the controversy earlier this year with a paper attacking the notion that remittances had helped to alleviate poverty. According to Sedesol research, if all the remittances were suddenly to stop, the proportion of Mexicans living in poverty would rise only from 47.1 per cent to 48.5 per cent. The proportion of remittance money going to poor families is even falling over time.
“For some people, remittances allow them to buy a basic basket of essential goods,” says Rodolfo Tuiran, of Sedesol, Mexico’s social development ministry. “But overall, in terms of poverty, remittances don’t have a significant impact. They do, however, have an important impact on inequality – they increase it. Of every $100 received, $75 goes to homes that aren’t poor.”
……….
However, remittances are increasingly being channelled to productive uses. Mexicans tend to congregate with people from the same home town, leading to a network of more than 600 home-town associations across the US. Typically, they have been involved in such things as organising trans-national beauty pageants. Now they are being encouraged to pool their remittances.
Several states now have “three-for-one” programmes, where each dollar from the home-town association for a development project is matched by a dollar each from the municipal, state and federal governments.
In Zacatecas, the silver mining state that sends the highest proportion of its people to the US, the effects are dramatic. Towns with a three-for-one scheme are immaculately paved and will often have a well-restored church. Towns that do not have dirt tracks.

Jennifer Gordon: Professor, Researcher, Activist, MacArthur Fellow

This is a brief profile of an individual who, as much as anyone in America, has thrown herself into clearing the difficult pathway for immigrants towards full integration into the domestic economy.
She is Associate Professor Law at Fordham University School of Law In New York City. Go here for her academic webpage. A 1992 graduate of Harvard Law School, she devoted much of the 1990s to helping to organize Workplace Project in Hempstead, Long Island.
In her 2005 book, Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights, she describes the struggle of many immigrants to enter the workforce and acquire step by step employee rights which American-born citizens take for granted.
In a 2005 article in the Boston Review (go here), she had this to say about working conditions and the long and exhausting effort to bring them up to minimally acceptable standards:

“Underground economy” suggests a system completely divorced from conventional labor markets. But in fact, the underground and mainstream economies are anything but divided. Immigrant workers and others move in and out of underground work. Furthermore, so-called underground businesses often operate in a relationship with larger and more formal enterprises. A name-brand garment manufacturer may depend on a chain of underground subcontractors to sew its clothing; a national superstore may contract its groundskeeping or roof repair or janitorial work to a local company that operates in the underground economy. And many enterprises are themselves formal in some regards and informal in others, complying with some but not all laws, paying workers in part on the books and in part under the table.

Since its founding thirteen years ago, the Workplace Project in Hempstead, Long Island, has grown from one desk in a room borrowed from a social-service agency into a vibrant membership organization of immigrant workers with the mission of fighting the low wages, high level of injuries, and pervasive abuses of immigrant workers on Long Island. Against the odds, the group has carried out a series of innovative organizing experiments in the underworld of immigrant work, some of which succeeded far beyond the organization’s expectations.

In its early years, the Workplace Project raised wages by over 30 percent on the Long Island street corners where day laborers wait for work—at least most of the time, in most places. They created a domestic-worker bill of rights and a model contract for domestic employers, and they forced placement agencies to promise to adhere to them—a promise that they sometimes kept. Since then, the organization has founded a very small but successful worker-owned landscaping cooperative and a much larger housecleaning co-op owned and operated by immigrant women.

Employer insurance fraud inflicts damage on workers

A not-for-attribution conversation with The Man Who Saw Everything.
Employer insurance fraud is a topic we will visit often: the toxic cocktail made by mixing strong employer incentives to cheat on workers compensation insurance with a vulnerable workforce, such as undocumented workers. An employer with a vulnerable workforce has a much greater incentive to cheat on insurance because it can expect its undocumented workers not to protest.
Here we learn from a California insurance professional, my Man Who Saw Everything. He has observed employer behavior close up for several decades from the insurer’s perspective. He knows how employers cheat.
He says that to understand the dynamics of cheating you need to know a little about cycles in the California workers compensation insurance market.
Insurance costs fell drastically in the second half other 1990s due to price-discounting competition among insurers. This left some insurers pricing their policies below any rational expectation of breaking even. Eventually some insurers failed. Insurance rates began to rise in the 2000s, to the point where workers compensation premiums in that state were over twice as high as the next costliest state in the nation. This Man Who Saw Everything believes that this huge cycle of high, low, and return to high contributed to the problem of cheating employers.
He told me:

In general, employers in high-risk occupations benefit the most when premiums fall and suffer the most when premiums rise. Roofers are among the hardest hit. While I was working for an insurance company we actually had a recent claim of a Latino worker falling from the tines of a forklift while placing shingles on a roof. This particular employer was covered but I have a roofer friend who has operated his business without WC for the past four years.

The problem is that when insurance rates fell, no employer said to itself, ”Hey, I had better bank some of these savings for tomorrow when rates rise”. Instead, they built their businesses around the lower cost factor for WC. When rates rose, they could choose to buy insurance, charge more and thereby become less competitive, or drop WC and hire workers less likely to file claims.

As to who is looking for the uninsured employers the answer is really no one. They are exposed when they draw a four after expecting an ace. One of the reliable undocumented workers falls off a roof, gets an attorney and files a claim. OSHA inspectors who cite him visit the employer, then the DOI gets involved and eventually the employer just folds his tent. You can bet they re-surface later so any enforcement agency spends considerable time chasing the same individuals.

I think this whole scenario is much more frequent in construction type industries that don’t rely on a brick and mortar location. I don’t know of any light manufacturers that exist without WC. However, I have known many who move employees on and off the books (premium fraud) and many never get caught.

The basic idea is to have two work sites. Insure one of the sites fully and correctly with a carrier but never advise of the other site. If anyone gets injured you list their work site as the one that is insured and put the worker on that payroll.

This usually gets exposed one of two ways. The carrier investigates the claim and learns of the other site when the worker provides the secondary site as the actual place of injury. It also is exposed when the employer repeatedly has workers injured on their first or second day of work. That is the day they moved the employee from one location to the other to assure the worker is covered by the WC.

undocumented worker vs. illegal alien

When applied to persons in the American workforce, these two terms refer to about the same population. At least I think so. Each has its advocates and distractors. I personally prefer undocumented worker, and generally use it. But if I cite a document which uses the term illegal alien, I also will use it to clarify the reference and out of deference to the author of the document.

Florida construction injuries and Hispanics (2005)

Construction Up, Injuries Up, but Workers’ Comp Payouts Down
This article by Jessica M. Walker first appeared in the Daily Business Review on 10/20/2005. The following is an excerpt, and the full article can be acessed at the link above. We will be carrying on a regular basis will researched journalism.
This particular articles talks about the toxic cocktail one mixes with undocumented workers with employers in high injjry industries.

In his mid-teens, Hector Noriega moved from Mexico to Miami to find work in South Florida’s booming construction industry. The immigrant followed his two brothers, who previously had found construction work there.

In August of last year, while he was pouring concrete at a residential construction site on Key Biscayne, the teenager was seriously injured when he came into contact with an electrical line. He survived the accident but suffered severe burns.

His attorney, Judson Cohen of Cohen Law Offices in Miami, said Noriega might lose his leg from the accident. No longer employable, Noriega, now 16, is living with family in Miami.

Most workers in Florida would have filed a workers’ compensation claim, collected a payout, and that would have been the end of it. Noriega, however, is an undocumented alien and was not listed on the workers’ comp policy of the subcontractor, C&C Concrete Pumping, or the Miami-based general contractor, Mackle Construction Co.

Ironically, Noriega’s illegal status may allow him to proceed with a negligence lawsuit in Miami-Dade Circuit Court when a U.S. citizen or other legal worker generally could not. That could allow him to recover more than he could through a workers’ comp claim. There are a growing number of undocumented workers like Noriega laboring in the South Florida construction industry, and experts say the legal situation could arise more often.

As South Florida’s construction boom continues, more workers are pouring into the area in search of work. For both legal and illegal workers, the ability to recover damages for on-the-job injuries has been constrained due to a sweeping 2003 revision in the state’s workers’ comp law that was pushed through by business and insurance groups to curb workers’ comp costs, experts say.

Steven Field, a retired University of South Florida professor who formerly directed the Florida Association of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, said he’s seen a rising number of construction-related injuries over the past eight years in Florida. But despite the increase, workers’ comp payouts are declining.

The total amount of workers’ comp claims payouts reported to the state Department of Financial Services fell in Miami-Dade County from $5.9 million in 2002 to $2.8 million in 2004. In Broward County, payouts declined from $4.2 million in 2002 to $2.3 million in 2004. In Palm Beach County, they fell from $4.2 million in 2002 to $2.1 million in 2004.

Michael Haggard, a plaintiffs attorney who is a partner at Haggard Parks Haggard & Lewis in Coral Gables, said, “You’re seeing more accidents but not more lawsuits because of the changes in the workers’ comp law.”

Field said the construction industry has little oversight when it comes to safety. “You see situations were no safety precautions are taken,” he said. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is supposed to enforce job safety rules, “has no standing with construction industry.”

Brazilian Immigrant Center (Boston, MA)

The Brazilian Immigrant Center in Boston — o Centro do Imigrante Brasileiro — runs a large number of educational and community action programs on behalf of the 100,000+ Brazilian workers in and around Boston. The site offers Portuguese and English options.
in English:

Who Are We???
The Brazilian Immigrant Center is a community-based organization working to empower Brazilians in the Greater Boston Area around issues of access to education, workplace rights and immigration. Our work is done through advocacy, education, organizing and leadership/capacity building.

What Are Our Goals???
The BIC’s mission is to unite Brazilian immigrants to organize against economic, social and political marginalization, and to help create a just society.

in Portuques:

Quem Somos Nós???
O Centro do Imigrante Brasileiro é uma organização, baseada nesta comunidade, procurando melhorar as vidas dos brasileiros em Boston, através de treinamento, organização e desenvolvimento de suas capacidades para liderança.

Qual é o Nosso Objetivo???
O objetivo do CIB é de organizar um movimento unido de brasileiros contra discriminação econômica, social e política.