Supreme Court hears challenge to workers' compensation law revision

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- Did lawmakers fix Missouri's broken system of compensating people for workplace injuries? Or did they pass a draconian change that reverted workers' rights to the 19th century?

Those are the contradictory views the Missouri Supreme Court is considering as part of a labor-union challenge heard Thursday to Missouri's 2005 workers' compensation law.

The revised law generally made it harder for employees to prove injuries are work related.

It was a priority for Republican Gov. Matt Blunt and the Republican-led legislature, who claimed the old system had become so tilted against employers that it was hurting Missouri's economy.

Cole County Senior Judge Byron Kinder upheld the law in January while rejecting labor union claims that it violated workers' due-process rights and other constitutional protections. Kinder said the Legislature was free to change the law as it sees fit.

Attorneys for the state and business groups echoed that assertion Thursday as they urged the Supreme Court to turn down an appeal from roughly 70 labor groups.

But labor attorney Alan Mandel, of St. Louis, said the 2005 changes made Missouri's law "the most draconian statute in the country." He denounced various provisions as "egregious," "horrendous" and "marching backwards into the 19th century."

Missouri's workers' compensation system was created in 1926 as a way to resolve injury claims through administrative proceedings rather than the courts. The intent was to provide aid more quickly to injured employees while sparing employers from the costs and uncertainties of circuit court trials.

Labor unions say the 2005 changes excluded large groups of people previously covered by the workers' compensation system.

"They so eviscerated that system of compensation that claimants were effectively denied access to any remedy at all," Mandel argued.

Among the more significant changes, the 2005 law requires workers to show a "specific event during a single work shift" to be compensated for an accident, no longer allowing a "series of events" to qualify. It also requires the accident to be "the prevailing factor" in an injury, instead of the previously lesser standard of a person's employment as "a substantial factor."

The effect, Mandel said, is that employees now have a tougher standard in the workers' compensation system than they would with an injury lawsuit in court. Yet those workers still are barred from suing because of the workers' compensation structure, he said.

An attorney for the state disagreed. Alana Barragan-Scott, an attorney general's office counsel representing the Department of Labor and Industrial Relations, suggested that a worker able to show only that employment was a "substantial factor" in an injury -- but not the "prevailing factor" -- now could sue in court as a result of the 2005 law.

Jefferson City attorney Marc Ellinger also argued in defense of the law on behalf of three business groups -- Associated Industries of Missouri, National Federal of Independent Business and Associated Home Builders and Contractors.

He said the 2005 law merely returned an out-of-whack system to the proper, original balance between employers and employees. For a long time, the old requirement that employment was a "substantial factor" in an injury had basically been determined to mean a "prevailing factor," Ellinger said. But "it got softened and softened" over time by the courts, he said.

The 2005 law also established new oversight for administrative law judges who hear workers' compensation cases. It created a review committee led by the director of the Workers' Compensation Division with two Republican and two Democratic legislators.

The committee is to vote every 12 years on whether to retain the administrative law judges and is to evaluate their performance every two years. If a judge gets a vote of no confidence after two separate reviews, he or she can be removed.

Mandel argued the new provision chills the judges' independent judicial function and violates the constitution's separation of powers, even though the judges are employees of the executive branch.

Omar Davis, director of the Department of Labor and Industrial Relations, said after the hearing that he was surprised by the interest shown in that argument by some Supreme Court judges.

"We thought that was noncontroversial," Davis said. "I cannot see how the department or governor can meddle with whether they are independent."