KINDER'S COMMENTARY: TACKLING WORKERS' COMP REFORM

On Monday of this week, joined by six Senate co-sponsors, I introduced the comprehensive workers' compensation reform bill of the 1996 session. Senate Bill 829 is supported by a broad coalition of business groups who recognize workers' comp as the foremost issue facing business in Missouri and a jobs and competitiveness issue of the first magnitude.

Missourians to Restore Fair Workers' Compensation is that broad-based organization. It includes, among many others, a few not-inconsequential business organizations such as the Missouri Chamber of Commerce, Associated Industries of Missouri, the National Federation of Independent Business, the Missouri Merchants and Manufacturing Association, the Home Builders Association of Missouri, Associated General Contractors of Missouri, the Missouri Restaurant Association, the Missouri Auto Dealers Association, the Missouri Association of Counties, the Missouri Municipal League, the National Association of Women Business Owners, the St. Louis Regional Commerce and Growth Association and the Southeast Missouri Business Group on Health, along with dozens of other statewide industry organizations and local chambers of commerce, including the Cape Girardeau Chamber of Commerce.

Discerning readers will recognize these organizations as possessing one thing in common: Though large and small, the tiny shopkeeper and the giant corporation, they are society's producers. These are the folks who get up early each morning, attack their jobs, take risks with their own capital, hire employees, serve their customers, pay rising workers' comp insurance premiums, struggle against a blizzard of government regulations and pay staggering sums in taxes before trying to generate whatever remaining sum is left in profit. Those profits serve either a) to reward this extraordinary effort through dividends to shareholders or, more likely, b) to invest most of those profits in the indispensable and unending improvement and modernization of their businesses. All these producers have been pushing for three years now for a version of SB 829 or something very much like it.

Against them are arrayed two special-interest groups: organized labor unions of the AFL-CIO and the personal-injury lawyers of the plaintiffs' bar -- the Missouri Association of Trial Attorneys. Of organized labor it must be stressed that their members are among society's producers. I will leave it to the reader to judge whether our friends who have ignited the litigation explosion belong primarily among society's producers or whether they are engaged chiefly in a massive income redistribution scheme into their own pockets.

While not exactly a sexy topic, still less one that captures the public imagination the way changing speed limits does, workers' comp is a $1 billion cost item for Missouri business. Gov. Mel Carnahan has said for three years now that we "fixed" workers' comp by passing a bill back in 1993. I don't know who the governor listens to, but that isn't what I hear from these producers. They want action, and they want it now, but that action is blocked by the two special-interest groups to whom Mel Carnahan is so beholden.

Our friends in organized labor are, of course, a keystone of the Democratic Party, and their concerns must be taken into account. I remain hopeful that they will come to see that their alliance with the personal-injury lawyers is an unholy one and that their overriding interest in a healthy job climate must take precedence over their overblown fears of commonsense reforms.

As with President Bill Clinton, so with Mel Carnahan: The trial lawyers are far and away his biggest contributors. They were in 1992, and they will be again this year. They owned former Speaker Bob Griffin, who twisted arms and (figuratively, at least) broke kneecaps for them as needed in the House. Perhaps that explains why the governor's top staff told key representatives of the Missouri Chamber and the NFIB to please don't bring us a bill that won't pass muster "with our natural constituencies."

A key question: How long will the vast majority of Missouri's producers tolerate a tiny but well-funded special-interest group such as the personal-injury lawyers holding an absolute veto over a subject as vital as workers' comp?

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.