December 20, 2020
Working in construction in Nashville means risking your life everyday, then being left to fend for yourself when you are injured.
“I requested physical therapy after my accident, and I was fired.”
“I lost 3 fingers and the doctor told me I must go back to work one week later.”
“I fractured my back and the doctor said my pain was just because of my age.”
These are just 3 of the countless stories we hear from construction workers who try to navigate the workers’ compensation and healthcare systems after they are hurt on the job. And they are 3 of the reasons we launched a new Workers’ Compensation Education and Organizing Program this fall.
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Many people are familiar with our popular education wage theft recovery program, but workplace injuries are just as common as wage theft. Nashville is, after all, the most dangerous city in the South for construction workers, with more injuries and deaths per worker than any of our peer cities. Our development boom has lined the pockets of real estate developers and general contractors, and they push workers to move at lightning speed to keep their cash cow flowing. And what’s worse, because of anti-worker and lax labor laws, companies get away with providing little or no training, oversight, or safety equipment. As our worker-leader Estaban once described it, “the employers want to rush to complete jobs in a small time frame. They tell us: ‘just do it. You don’t need support or a ladder. Just do your work.’ So there is a lot of pressure.”
We started a health and safety committee this summer after the death of Gustavo Rameriz. Our vision is safe workplaces where we don’t worry about whether we will come home alive at the end of a shift. But before we get there, we need a way to find justice after we are injured.
We started a Workers’ Compensation Education and Organizing Program
Workers’ compensation, in theory, is a resource for injured workers to receive replacement wages and coverage for healthcare services after an injury. But the reality is a bureaucratic maze that workers must navigate with roadblocks all along the way. An anti-worker policy environment first tries to shield employers from ever being liable for the dangerous conditions they allow. The contracting chain makes it easy for bosses to deny responsibility by misclassifying workers so they are not accountable for providing insurance. And when workers do assert their rights, they regularly face retaliation and threats that they will lose their job if they seek expensive treatment or healthcare. If the worker does make it into the doctor’s office, all the problems in our broken, profit-driven, and racist healthcare system are laid bare. Workers’ pain is regularly dismissed, and short term fixes (“take this pain medication”) are pushed for serious injuries that require more comprehensive care. Insurance companies regularly deny claims, which are often based on the parameters defined by the employer in the first place.
There are so many cracks in a system that is already anti-worker by design, that it is hard to even tell where most people get lost in the bureaucracy. And it’s even more difficult if English is not your first language.
To respond to what workers need, this past October we launched the first-of-its-kind Workers’ Compensation Education and Organizing Program. We’ve hired interns, from our base, who successfully navigated the process to develop an intake and accompaniment system that teaches other workers about our rights and how to assert them. We partnered with Vanderbilt Law School to host regular virtual clinics for workers to meet with legal advocates to discuss questions about their cases. And we are adapting our worker-to-worker, popular education approach from our wage theft work to teach each other organizing skills. We are providing a needed service, but more importantly– we’re mapping exactly what we need to organize to change through public pressure campaigns. Workers’ should not have to be retraumatized by more abuse after they have already been injured for the boss’s profit.
Workers are getting what we deserve
Rony, a glassworker, won replacement wages when he was unable to work after a debilitating injury that required knee surgery. His boss first threatened him then retaliated against him for demanding the surgery he needed to be able to walk. Rony came to our clinic and went through the process to win replacement wages from the company– the very least of what they morally owe him. While he may have lost some of his health due to greed that pushes workers to their limits, at least he hasn’t lost his livelihood.
We need your support so we can make this new program sustainable, expand it, and teach other worker centers how to replicate it. Your donations to our Year End Fund Drive help us keep paid interns on staff to increase our capacity and accompany workers. If you believe workers deserve safe worksites and recourse for their injuries, please donate today.
We also need community support! If you are a healthcare professional that knows how to navigate the system, or if you work in the insurance industry, we want you on our team. Respond to this email for more information.