Beyond Ground Zero Network

I am a former office worker at Ground Zero affected by the toxic fallout from 9/11. I am outraged that the mental and physical health problems that office workers and the approximately 10,000 non-union clean-up workers are suffering from have received so little attention. And now the Bush administration has fired Dr. John Howard, the former director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health who was an important ally in the fight to monitor and protect the health of World Trade Center workers. Is this not an attack on the living victims of 9/11!

Here’s what has happened.

First, the Bush administration’s Environmental Protection Administration denied that the toxic air caused health problems for those of us who lived and went back to work near Ground Zero. Second, Michael Leavitt replaced Christine Whitman at EPA when she was nailed for not giving correct information about air quality and its effects on people exposed. Third, Congress allocated $108 million to address the health problems of clean-up workers and residents as well as first-responders (cops, firefighters, medical personnel, the 400,000 victims of 9/11’s toxic air.

Finally I felt hope. But wait. Bush probably signed this law to look good, not to do the right thing. That same Michael Leavitt has now become Secretary of Health and Human Services and his department has refused to release the $108 million, saying they need more time to study workers’ exposure to the 9/11 fallout. And it is Michael Leavitt who is now leaving us without an administrator or a program. Without resources and an advocate the victims will die one by one and no one will be held accountable for this atrocity.

Isn’t this the American Way!

Celia Correa, NMASS/BGZ member

Compensating Construction (and Other) Workers

“A dangerous business,” said Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Yes indeed. In the fallout from the second fatal crane accident in three months he and construction professionals are telling us that such events are inevitable. While erecting skyscrapers is surely a perilous enterprise, the people who risk their lives to undertake it should not be regarded simply as the human detritus of a building boom.

It’s not just crane accidents. In the last year in New York City more than two dozen construction workers have died, according to “Insurance Journal,” falling from office towers and apartment buildings, being hit by collapsing walls and scaffolds. Lesser injuries occur more frequently but are reported rarely; the major exception is the claim against the city of nearly 8000 workers who spent months cleaning up the rubble of September 11 and who now suffer from respiratory ailments, cancers, and psychological trauma.

The buck stops with the Mayor when preventing workplace accidents is the challenge. But protecting workers who have been injured is primarily a state responsibility. Governor David Patterson included some big-ticket items in his new budget—education, economic development, children’s health care. He should now turn his attention to reform of New York’s Workers’ Compensation system.

Workers’ Compensation has had a checkered career in New York. Initially proposed in 1907 by an idealistic young lawyer as a way to keep families afloat when workers were injured, it has not lived up to its protective promise. Seventy years ago New York workers and their families were filing almost 200,000 claims annually, a number that continues to shrink although there are many more workers. This decrease can be attributed in part to less dangerous working conditions. But the decline in filings reflects justifiable cynicism on the part of workers who feel that a system designed to provide medical benefits or adequate compensation for lost wages has abandoned them.

To apply for benefits is to submit to a tedious and sometimes humiliating process. Workmens’ Compensation judges often presume that workers’ claims are baseless or fraudulent. Until very recently the maximum benefit for lost wages was $400 per week (capped at two-thirds of the worker’s weekly wage), less than half of what Connecticut provides and two-thirds of New Jersey’s maximum benefit—and few receive that much.

Delays in processing claims are also powerful deterrents to asking for assistance. A recent report by the New York State Insurance Department found that the average length of time to resolve a claim opposed by the employer or the insurance carrier is almost eight months, and a decision on an appeal from an initial judgment will take, on average, more than five months. Even when a case is resolved in favor of the worker payment can take many weeks. New York’s performance in this area is among the worst in the country.

New York’s system confounds workers in other ways. While the Workers’ Compensation Board has been trying to speed up its claims process—substituting administrative decisions on individual cases for judgments based on hearings on the evidence—this worthy goal may reflect an interest in saving money more than concern for workers’ needs. What the system gains in efficiency—a reduction of a month or two in the time it takes to get benefits to workers—it loses in transparency and clarity; one critic calls the administrative decisions “largely comprised of boilerplate language that is unintelligible to most injured workers.” Many of these reviews simply end in a determination that “no further action” is necessary. While this phrase does not mean that the door has been closed to appeals or future claims, workers often understand it that way.

Former Governor Spitzer could have brightened this picture. In March 2007 he signed the Workers’ Compensation Reform Act, which ostensibly benefited workers by raising both minimum and maximum benefit levels for injuries incurred from July of that year. But the minimum level—the likely benefit for low-wage workers—is still only $100 per week and the $500 maximum is therefore fantasy for most claimants. The legislation also capped benefits that can be paid to someone who is partially but permanently disabled.

The Governor’s real purpose, apparently, was to benefit employers and insurance carriers; in July he boasted in an op-ed piece that one of his early achievements was “a 20% cut in workers’ compensation rates.” The administrative reforms to expedite the processing of claims—the so-called “rocket docket”—are likely to be a boon to businesses by giving them more information at earlier stages, strengthening their hand in resisting claims.

Nonetheless, Spitzer did put some reform-minded officials at the helm of the Workers’ Compensation Board. After the first crane accident in March the Board’s new chair, Zach Weiss, was quick to announce that he had called on his “rapid response team…to advance the claims of deceased and injured workers.”

Governor Paterson has an opportunity to build on this more worker-friendly approach and deliver on the promise of reform suggested by the new legislation. He can appoint judges who are sympathetic to the claimants’ injuries and diseases and who will resist the efforts of insurance carriers to evade liability. He can act administratively to see that his aides make the “rocket docket” work for claimants, especially for the 9/11 cleanup crews and first responders who helped bring the city back to life but have yet to receive the compensation they deserve. He can pressure the state legislature to raise the minimum benefit level again and repeal the unfair cap that limits the duration of benefits to the person who can still work but whose post-injury job does not pay a living wage.

Finally, Governor Paterson can balance the need to reduce costs with the humanitarian duty to ease the pain and loss of workers and their families. This is the least that should be done for New Yorkers whose jobs have cost them their lives or their health.

Diana R. Gordon
Professor Emerita of Political Science, CUNY

Tammy Kim
Attorney, Community Development Project, Urban Justice Center

To the Editor:

The report released by New York City discrediting the claimed health problems suffered by 9/11 rescue and clean-up workers flies in the face of thousands of people's experiences. First, based only on medical records, the report neglects the severity of seemingly benign upper-respiratory symptoms like coughing and shortness of breath. Second, it fails to consider the 9/11 health fallout, as thousands of low-wage, private sector employees now suffering from much more than stuffy noses or coughs--serious pulmonary problems, asthma, persistent rashes, and depression--are not represented in the lawsuit. Third, the report is premature: the World Trade Center Environmental Health Center, comprising three city hospital clinics, has yet to release its empirical data demonstrating the range of maladies that doctors at Bellevue, Elmhurst, and Gouverneur have diagnosed. And finally, personal experience with assisting workers who are applying for benefits from New York's Workers' Compensation Board suggests that many clean-up workers hired by private contractors, often for less than minimum wage, have suffered in silence--either they did not know their conditions were related to 9/11 exposure or thought they could not afford medical care (free services are available at the Center--http://www.nyc.gov/html/hhc/html/services/wtc-health-center.shtml).

JoAnn Lum, Beyond Ground Zero Network

212-358-0295 / beyondgroundzero@gmail.com

More than five years after the events of 9/11, NYC's chief medical examiner has for the first time linked a death to exposure to WTC dust immediately after 9/11.

Read more about it here in a NY Times article.